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Desperation for Ratings and Sponsors Played Role in Death of Indy's Dan Wheldon

By Jim Edwards

Updated on: October 17, 2011 / 7:12 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

The death of IndyCar driver Dan Wheldon illuminates motor racing's dark side: The hand-in-hand role that the desire for greater sponsorship money and TV ratings plays in making racing more "exciting." For "exciting," read "dangerous." Crashes are to racing what fist fights are to ice hockey. Ideally, they should never occur. But fans love them, and racing's owners, sponsors and broadcasters know that.

Prior to Sunday's 15-car pileup at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, IndyCar was in particularly desperate straits. Danica Patrick was leaving the sport. Last year's TV ratings for the season finale race were horrible, and IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard said prior to the race:

How we end our year is so important with so much riding on next year ... We can't have a repeat of last year. We have to have something of significance.

In an effort to create "something of significance," Bernard rented the Las Vegas track, sold sponsorships to hotels and casinos, and set up a one-off $5 million prize for any driver from the rival Nascar circuit who entered the race and won. He got no takers, but a "desperate" Wheldon, the 2005 IndyCar Series champion, didn't have a racing team this year (following a slump in form) and was deemed eligible to enter the race as a sort of wild card. Bernard regarded the $5 million stunt as part of his ad budget:

"I've told them, 'Guys, think big picture. "This is how much money I have to spend on advertising, it's not that much, tell me how would you spend it?" Bernard said. "Nobody has any other ideas on a national advertising campaign that can drive our ratings, put people in seats and give us a new database. If somebody has another idea, then I'll do it next year. But this is what we've got right now."

That set up two different races in one: Wheldon's attempt to win the $5 million prize for outsiders, and the battle for the Indy season champion, which came down to Dario Franchitti and Will Power, both of whom needed to place during this race to snag the $1 million season-long prize. Here's how anxious Bernard was for this ploy to pay off, prior to the start:

He's said more than once he'll offer his resignation if the race is a failure, which he defines as anything below a .8 rating for ABC's nationally televised Sunday broadcast.

"My only goal has been to make sure our momentum is really, really strong leaving Las Vegas and we've got something to build on."

In hindsight, placing a driver desperate for a $5 million payday (that might have led back to a permanent contract with another racing team) against two drivers who'd spent the entire season eking out championship points looks like a collision waiting to happen.

Parallels with Earnhardt
Racing has seen this before. When Nascar got its first contract to broadcast races nationally on Fox in 2001, the organization altered its aerodynamics rules in a way that favored crashes. "Restrictor plate" racing caps drivers' top speeds, causing cars to bunch up as they go round the track. It's exciting for fans to watch. It's also way more dangerous than allowing the cars to go as fast as they can.

Legendary driver Dale Earnhardt hated the rules:

"They took Nascar Winston Cup racing and made it some of the sorriest racing," he said. "They took racing out of the hands of the drivers and the crews. We can't adjust and make our cars drive like we want. They just killed the racing at Daytona. This is a joke to have to race like this."

Earnhardt, of course, died at the Daytona 500 a few days later, after he was bumped by one of three cars bunched behind him.

Bernard -- and auto racing generally -- was desperate because there is an over-supply of racing and a lack of demand from audiences. In addition to IndyCar there is Nascar and its various series (which include more than 1,500 races at 100 tracks), and Formula 1. The business story of Nascar and Indy, for the last decade or more, has been of stagnant TV audiences, empty seats at tracks, and teams struggling to find the sponsors they need to race.

If the death of Wheldon were to presage the death of IndyCar, it may make racing safer overall by steadying the economics of Nascar and making race organizers less desperate for "excitement."

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Image by Wikimedia, CC.