Quote:
Originally Posted by helgi
(why on earth are Germans so nuts about F1?)
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One reason: Michael Schumacher. Although F1 is also declining in popularity in Germany. Not only was the attendance of the German GP in freefall, TV ratings were also falling in 2015.
Well, the hopes I and perhaps "we" had in 2011 that DTM would finally improve...well, they haven't come true. While the level of talent in this series has certainly been raised when compared to 2009, everything else has been horribly managed. Also, what use do young drivers from single-seater feeder series have, when they're not marketed at all? Not to mention that we've had the third German champion in a row and yet only Pascal Wehrlein is slowly getting some recogniton among mainstream German racing fans (Which is obviously due to his ties to the Mercedes F1 team). But as for people like Rockenfeller or Wittmann? No chance. Time and time again I've mentioned that back in the 90's, drivers like Schneider, Stuck, Ludwig and perhaps Biela and Winkelhock were at least fairly well known at a time, where Michael Schumacher caused a real racing boom in Germany.
I don't know about other countries, but apart from Football, every type of sports in Germany is destined to blow up like a bubble, only to burst. Take tennis: Boris Becker and Steffi Graf caused a tennis boom in Germany, but once both retired, tennis coverage in the German media went way down. In a sense, the same also happens to F1 at the moment, despite the fact that we still have two top drivers, as well as a German manufacturer dominating the series. I guess the German mainstream sporting fans are tired and saturated by F1. But a declining interest in F1 doesn't spell good things for DTM and such. In my opinion, mainstream interest in other forms of racing in Germany only comes alongside a high interest in F1. But when people move away from F1, they move entirely away from racing.
But in my opinion, it's not neccesarily such a bad thing: The German racing scene can perhaps consolidate itself, rebuild (With the ADAC GT Masters, the new TCR Series and the DTC, as well as VLN, there a more than solid foundation) and recharge forward in a couple of years. But the first step has to be to closedown of DTM, because that series takes up too many resources: Too many sponsors, too much public interest (even though it's falling), too many fans. When the DTM doesn't take any of these away, other series can surely make good use of it.