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Did anyone from here visit the race? Curious to hear what it was like at the track, because from the sidelines I don't see how this weekend was anything other than a massive failure.
The track was a mess and clearly not ready - to the extraordinary degree that Lindström (who is still the boss of Swedish GT) flat out said it was unsafe and should not have passed inspection. The layout was uninspired and did not lend itself to good racing. The officiating was laughable in that the leader and third place car got drive throughs for working on their cars before the start - when the race was almost over! Compounded by Mangs not taking his drive through and being disqualified, along with Brovallen having a shouting match with the officials in pit lane saying they hadn't been given any information. Thank god Ohlsson passed Mangs before the finish, because otherwise it would have been the laughable Robby Gordon situation of a disqualified guy winning the race.
They've not exactly shouted the official spectator figure from the rooftops but 5500 has to be way, way short of what they were hoping for. This was hyped as a marquee event with it's proximity to Stockholm but with their extortionist prices they got only a couple of hundred people more than Anderstorp. Swedish GT only had half of the grid from Anderstorp (talk about heaven and hell), and they really need to get Lindström back in the booth to make the races watchable (I listened to it on web radio with live timing and couldn't understand half of what was happening). And for some strange reason reliability issues have started creeping into the TTA cars - you would have thought this was the first race of the season, not the penultimate.
And to top that off, the TV broadcast was a jumbled mess. Compare and contrast with Karlskoga, which was pretty much spot on. Poor camera placings, few cameras, poor production, missed action, disconnected commentators who often talked about what was happening off screen... And when things were missed there were few replays to be had. Untill I saw the Youtube highlights I had no idea Dahlgren got run into, and it's really a bit late by then. The move to TV6 didn't help one bit (well, a little - but 39,000 is still way too low, especially after STCC had 190,000 last round) and did anyone buy Sunday's Aftonbladet? I picked up Expressen and they didn't print a single sentence on the race. And that's after they gave one of their reporters a ride around the track and he did a pre-race report about meeting the Prince. But then that article didn't even manage to explain that Bernadotte's shot at the title was in Swedish GT, not TTA...
It's like everyone brought their B game to Tierp. The thing is... they were a lot better than this at the start of the season. When TTA kicked off it looked - save for Miller & Brunstedt in the Brovallen cars - like a well prepared, professional championship. They drew an OK crowd, had OK TV figures. But since then, it's like they've just kept backing into a corner more and more. Partly it has to be down to their attitude - every time they get criticized they get aggressive/defensive and claim people don't understand or that they do it their way (the proper way).
Because right now, I don't see any main series in Sweden that does not look like a house of cards at the moment.
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