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Old 25 Dec 2015, 11:50 (Ref:3600139)   #18
chunder
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Join Date: Nov 2000
England
Stevenage
Posts: 8,298
chunder should be qualifying in the top 3 on the gridchunder should be qualifying in the top 3 on the gridchunder should be qualifying in the top 3 on the grid
No one city deserves anything really. London is NOT and never will be again the place to have a race track, it is too populous and far too full of rich people and foreigners for it to ever work. Also it is not industrial, it is financial, how are you going to change that overnight? Nitro Circus? DIRT Showdown? 90 quid a ticket no thanks, this is working man's entertainment, not NBA Jam.

Mr collins attitude to short oval racing is predictably bad, but for those of us that spend a lot of time there there are good signs. Grids in a lot of classes are good, some tracks are under threat yes, but others are opening. There is a new speedway track in Manchester, new tracks have opened in Holland in the past few years and there are rumours of new ones in the UK, albeit in toxic waste parts of the UK where they can only be really.

London is not industrial, the market short oval has been catering for for years. The only way you could change that is money, PR, new purpose built tracks. So saying short oval racing needs to change is fine if you spend lots of time in America, but Europe doesn't care and never has for short ovals, no matter what you do. The two tracks built over here to capitalise on CART, Mansell mania etc were dismal failures as racetracks, with good crowds and good PR. It doesn't work, it never will work, Europe doesn't care about oval racing to that degree!

I agree that attitudes must change, but the people that run these places are small business men, not media moguls, they are incessantly fighting noise issues, delapidated buildings, some simply promote, they don't even own the venues so how on earth can you expect them to spend money improving a place they don't own!

I am not quite sure what 21st century short oval racing is supposed to be really. All that we need to get better is a Palmer type figure to be more ruthless, make hard decisions, and a lot of the issues are fixed. Right now you have a group of people who are content to take the money, do nothing and sit tight.

If you these basics the people will come, look at Santa Pod, simple measures taken, made a scrapyard into a reasonable venue and the crowds are good. It's not hard.

But it does help having a track in the middle of nowhere! Something most short oval racing venues are not, especially one in London.
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