2016 Season. Round 1: Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, March 11-13.

[Adam43]

Woo!

[rwintle]

Originally Posted by bjohnsonsmith

Now you mention it, there wasn't an opportunity wasted to mention the Indy 500. One commentator referred to today's race as preparation to the 500 by Team Penske. The two races couldn't be further apart.

Holy crap yes. I hope none of you guys were playing a drinking game and taking a shot every time the Indy was mentioned.

[fredd1]

Originally Posted by RWill2073

Kind of a boring race. Lot of my favorites were out of contention early. Wished pagenaud had won.

One big glaring negative: the broadcast. Being an imsa fan, I'm used to their broadcasts being used as infomercials, and that's exactly what this one felt like. It was an infomercial for the Indy 500. Every little thing that happened was tied into Indy somehow. Before they said it at the end, I thought to myself, the rest of the races befor Indy must be on nbcsn or something the way they're completely dismissing every other round. Sure enough, they said at the end that their next broadcast is Indy. Just a terrible production by abc. I look forward to nbcsn broadcasts.

The broadcast sucked absolutely. The talking heads lack of interest in proceedings just took a boring race to a lower level.

I would estimate better then 60% of the racecast had no commentary whatsoever, which did nothing to mitigate the previously mentioned disinterest. During the silent periods the ticker detailing position stops too so for long periods there're cars flashing by to fast to really take any detail.

Don't know whether that's unique to my location. All I can assume is that the silent breaks are ad breaks Stateside. If so you guys are really unlucky...

Oh and one more thing. A small event on track with a car spun and we had a lengthy yellow while the track was swept, FFS!

[D.R.T.]

Was a little disapointing to wake up at 4am for the race to find out that the pole sitter wouldnt be running however I enjoyed the race.

Good to have Indycar back and looked like a good crowd turn out in St Pete

[RWill2073]

Definitely seemed to be a lot of commercials, too. Seriously, did the IMSA/ALMS people take over the production for this race or what?

[BudLightJaguar]

During commercial breaks they showed only an ESPN logo. Not like last season when the feed was still on the air and only muted.

ESPN subscription was way cheaper this year but I still find this unacceptable.

[NaBUru38]

I couldn't make ESPN Play.com work. I tried Firefox and IE on Windows, and Firefox and Chrome on Android. Nothing worked, so I missed a third of the race. I found a good ABC stream, but I missed Latin announcers Andrés Agulla and Alex Pombo.

I found it pretty boring, but anyway, Montoya won on merit.

Did the ABC announcers ever mention Phoenix?

[bjohnsonsmith]

Originally Posted by NaBUru38

I couldn't make ESPN Play.com work. I tried Firefox and IE on Windows, and Firefox and Chrome on Android. Nothing worked, so I missed a third of the race. I found a good ABC stream, but I missed Latin announcers Andrés Agulla and Alex Pombo.

I found it pretty boring, but anyway, Montoya won on merit.

Did the ABC announcers ever mention Phoenix?

Now you mention it, I don't think they did.

[Deleted]

Obviously ABC wants to advertise one thing they know can get (semi) respectable ratings later this year. They only care of the 500, and probably have these other leftover races written in contract as mandatory "network responsibilities" because the series wouldn't give the exclusivity for it otherwise. Just as I suspect is also the case with Le Mans - WEC on Eurosport, and before with LMS

[gert]

Originally Posted by RWill2073

Definitely seemed to be a lot of commercials, too. Seriously, did the IMSA/ALMS people take over the production for this race or what?

where I watch I can see the races without any commercials at all (IMSA, not Indycar). Just the stream on the series' website.

[bjohnsonsmith]

Originally Posted by gert

where I watch I can see the races without any commercials at all (IMSA, not Indycar). Just the stream on the series' website.

Were IMSA streaming yesterday's race?

[Tja]

Originally Posted by BudLightJaguar

During commercial breaks they showed only an ESPN logo. Not like last season when the feed was still on the air and only muted.





ESPN subscription was way cheaper this year but I still find this unacceptable.

Thought so too, I'm quite happy I only picked the one race option. Paying for that logo for about a third of the time really annoyed me. At least I got that in HD though, whereas the actual race was close to unwatchable on my TV...



Pretty uneventful race at the front, but some good racing behind. Hopefully Power will be back next time.

[D.R.T.]

TV Ratings from St Pete.

Up on 2015

http://www.racer.com/north-american-...-in-overnights

[fieldodreams79]

Holy crap. I missed this in it's entirety,which is a shame as I generally like Saint Pete. Spring break last week and into the weekend with the fam took me away from this but certainly didn't expect it to be so soon.

Good on JPM for the win. Not bad for a cheeseburger eater!

Nice to see ratings are up. Hope that trend continues.

[10TENTHS]

It's already been uploaded to Youtube.

[S griffin]

Just watched the race today. Great win by Monty, glad to see he hasn't last year's title disappointment get him down. I can't help but think how much better his results would have been in F1 had they used slicks. But I digress...

Great drive by Daly, never looked flustered up front and typical street circuit traffic jam in turn 4

[gttouring]

Montoya made that look easy just cruising while everyone scrapped, he seems to do that when he is comfortable

[10TENTHS]

Originally Posted by gttouring

Montoya made that look easy just cruising while everyone scrapped, he seems to do that when he is comfortable

Pagenaud was closing at the end, but seemed to struggle passing the lapped cars.