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Monster pay a lot in all honesty to give the world diabetes! Have you seen how much damned sugar there is in it!!
Being serious, the reason they are heavily involved is obviously the link with Doran, and the reason the drift stuff is there is coz of their family involvement with other activities at the track that get big crowds and cars turning up.
Rallycross is on the up in some ways and not others. It is on the up because a huge marketing company has decided to take a perfectly good product, wrap it up in a black and green coke can and market it to big cities, countries with no rallycross heritage and tracks that are new and not really that good.
These are good things in some ways. Taking the sport to new places is good, taking the tracks to bigger cities is good too.
European ralycross has been on tv for quite a while, but sadly the current coverage is strictly limited to an hour, that if you live in Europe and are busy when it is shown live you are left in the dark (and dare you even try and get it on Eurosport after the event), you cannot watch it on livestream anymore as you could before. That needs sorting. But what IMG want you to do is watch it on youtube of course to raise ad revenue for themselves. Fair enough.
IMG have a good social media presence, they are doing things the previous people did not do, but would have got round to, IMG have speeded that all up.
These are all good things believe me. They have also tried to make teams an important part of rallycross which is odd as they never have been as it is and should be a totally individual sport, not speedway.
But at what cost, the cars are getting ever more expensive, budgets now are at their highest, and they are lucky or well planned in that they are exploiting the punters boredam with WRC very nicely.
But they should perhaps be aware that there was rallycross before they came along with your riot rigs and single make formulas. It has support in existing places, and simply charging the earth for them to host rounds is not a great way to endear yourself to that heritage or fans, by then going to places with no interest who have massive budgets to spend on motorsport in their countries, like Turkey, Argentina and Canada.
As I say a lot of what IMG are doing is good, very good. But it needs to be tempered a little. Is there a legacy? Do they even know what that means? Are they in for the long haul?
Let's hope so.
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