Ninjette Newsbot
September 15th, 2008, 12:22 PM
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Some serious props have to go out to the nineteen men who braved the elements and started on the Indianapolis Moto GP grid yesterday. I can’t think of a race in recent memory - on at any level - that had such poor weather conditions. It looked like these guys were riding on a patch of land in the Bering Straits during rainy season. It was just an absolute mess and unfortunately a completely missed opportunity to captivate non-riders in America…
Obviously the weather is outside human control, but I doubt anyone who wasn’t already a Moto GP fan before the race started will remember anything about the race itself — Except perhaps for the poor conditions. That’s a shame.
This weekend’s race represented a real opportunity to hook the American public on sportbikes. Finally the best of the best in the world were going to be showcased live on the same weekend that the NFL was playing. This meant that there was a TV friendly audience already sitting on their couches with their remotes in hand. Yet NBC and it’s race-coverage team dropped the ball. This wasn’t compelling television by any stretch, rather it was a completely in-the-know affair where non-riders were never ‘let into the sport’ but rather kept on the outside looking in. Nobody even mentioned that at the first sign of foul weather the NASCAR big boys flag the race and wait it out. Yet here, with two less wheels and a heck of a lot less traction, these nineteen brave souls were flying around the most hallowed racetrack in America while throwing caution to the wind and everyone acted as if it were routine.
Lets see any average rider - heck any average driver - go 175 miles per hour down the front strait in a thirty to thirty-five mile an hour cross wind and not end up in the gravel. What these guys were doing was absolutely incredible and yet watching it on the tube felt not only anticlimactic but dramaless.
Of course that was before the utter confusion unfolded once Dorna red flagged the event… Roughly forty minutes into an hour broadcast the race was called and for the next twenty minutes or so nobody seemed to know what was going on… “The red flag is out, we have a winner, oh wait maybe we don’t, ok we do, hang on are they going to race again?… Let’s go to commercial”…
As if the non-riders in the audience weren’t confused enough during the actual racing, now our beloved sport looked clueless at best. The NFL, with whom the GP was competing for eyeballs, would never showcase so much chaos on such a national stage with seemingly no definitive answer until fifteen seconds before the hour broadcast was over.
Obviously circumstances outside of anyone’s control contributed to confusion, but as a viewer it seemed pretty clear that everyone at the track knew it was raining and that it was going to continue raining - the weather clearly wasn’t a surprise by any stretch - so shouldn’t there have been a plan put in place for how and when a red flag would come out and ultimately a clear way to articulate what that plan was to a sporting television audience that undoubtedly, thanks to the NFL, was the largest to ever have the opportunity to watch a GP race live here in the States?
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?i=kPRBL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?a=kPRBL) http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?i=tUb3L (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?a=tUb3L) http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?i=mWl4L (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?a=mWl4L)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/twistingasphalt/JFfB/~4/393287117
Click here for full story... (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/twistingasphalt/JFfB/~3/393287117/)
Some serious props have to go out to the nineteen men who braved the elements and started on the Indianapolis Moto GP grid yesterday. I can’t think of a race in recent memory - on at any level - that had such poor weather conditions. It looked like these guys were riding on a patch of land in the Bering Straits during rainy season. It was just an absolute mess and unfortunately a completely missed opportunity to captivate non-riders in America…
Obviously the weather is outside human control, but I doubt anyone who wasn’t already a Moto GP fan before the race started will remember anything about the race itself — Except perhaps for the poor conditions. That’s a shame.
This weekend’s race represented a real opportunity to hook the American public on sportbikes. Finally the best of the best in the world were going to be showcased live on the same weekend that the NFL was playing. This meant that there was a TV friendly audience already sitting on their couches with their remotes in hand. Yet NBC and it’s race-coverage team dropped the ball. This wasn’t compelling television by any stretch, rather it was a completely in-the-know affair where non-riders were never ‘let into the sport’ but rather kept on the outside looking in. Nobody even mentioned that at the first sign of foul weather the NASCAR big boys flag the race and wait it out. Yet here, with two less wheels and a heck of a lot less traction, these nineteen brave souls were flying around the most hallowed racetrack in America while throwing caution to the wind and everyone acted as if it were routine.
Lets see any average rider - heck any average driver - go 175 miles per hour down the front strait in a thirty to thirty-five mile an hour cross wind and not end up in the gravel. What these guys were doing was absolutely incredible and yet watching it on the tube felt not only anticlimactic but dramaless.
Of course that was before the utter confusion unfolded once Dorna red flagged the event… Roughly forty minutes into an hour broadcast the race was called and for the next twenty minutes or so nobody seemed to know what was going on… “The red flag is out, we have a winner, oh wait maybe we don’t, ok we do, hang on are they going to race again?… Let’s go to commercial”…
As if the non-riders in the audience weren’t confused enough during the actual racing, now our beloved sport looked clueless at best. The NFL, with whom the GP was competing for eyeballs, would never showcase so much chaos on such a national stage with seemingly no definitive answer until fifteen seconds before the hour broadcast was over.
Obviously circumstances outside of anyone’s control contributed to confusion, but as a viewer it seemed pretty clear that everyone at the track knew it was raining and that it was going to continue raining - the weather clearly wasn’t a surprise by any stretch - so shouldn’t there have been a plan put in place for how and when a red flag would come out and ultimately a clear way to articulate what that plan was to a sporting television audience that undoubtedly, thanks to the NFL, was the largest to ever have the opportunity to watch a GP race live here in the States?
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?i=kPRBL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?a=kPRBL) http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?i=tUb3L (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?a=tUb3L) http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?i=mWl4L (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/twistingasphalt/JFfB?a=mWl4L)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/twistingasphalt/JFfB/~4/393287117
Click here for full story... (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/twistingasphalt/JFfB/~3/393287117/)