http://www.autoweek.com/article/2013...d&utm_campaign

I think they key thing the article really didn't touch on was that the timing for the COTA ALMS/WEC race wasn't exactly great. End of summer, "event fatigue" for the local Austin race fan crowd, and just close enough to F1 that people decided to give it a miss.

Steven Cole-Smith makes some good points though.

 

Tried to watch the race on TV (DVR) and was totally boring. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 

I was doing a DE that weekend at TWS otherwise I would have most likely gone.

 

It was also the same weekend as the SCCA Runoffs - more than 700 road racing cars and teams were at Road America, along with a reasonable number of regional spectators. One would have to think that this was a bit of a conflict, as well.

 

Three points:

1. it's Freaking College Football season!! Austin is a college town and football is king in Texas, period!. You're not going to draw from a local populous to fill that place. WEC is not F1.

2. The best thing about attending races in person is a stimulation of all the senses, particularly sound. The article says these cars are not loud. Ever been to an F1 race? As the cars all come around in front of you the noise is felt deep in your chest and before the double clutch seemless trannys the downshifts felt like thunder just 100 yards away!

3. They need to hire Mike Skeen as a driver and have his girlfriend in the pit area to get a couple smacks against the other drivers to get some pub going.

 

Good point. Many of the people that would have taken the trouble to travel to Austin for something like this would have otherwise been occupied...same demographic. I think having a unified series next year will likely help quite a bit. The Rolex race was fairly well attended.

 

Only 5,500 people showed up for the WEC race? Ouch....

 

That was how many were still there at the end of a very boring race. The alms race on Saturday had an ok crowd. There was almost no publicity for WEC prior to the race weekend. It seemed like it was an afterthought when it came to publicity. Honestly there was t much about alms either and I don't think much of the general public even knows what alms is/was.

 

I was there Sat/Sun ( I missed the monsoon on Friday)

Saturday's crowd was pretty decent for a stand-alone ALMS race (i.e. no Indycar or other US series). a few drivers/teams I talked to were impressed with the crowd, probably 20k of the weekend's 35k total.

on Saturday I ran into a friend/customer from SoCal who was there with his brother. they both had traveled to Texas from CA and AZ specifically for ALMS. they had NO IDEA that there was a WEC race on Sunday. that right there is a promoting fail.

neither race was particularly action packed, but it was almost 9 hours of the world's most sophisticated race cars blasting around a state of the art facility, I was in heaven. my sister and BIL joined me on Sunday and enjoyed it, that was their first race experience.

Sports cars will always be a small crowd in the US (except for Sebring and Petit, and maybe Daytona), so we need to measure our responses to not filling a 100k+ facility; but I do think the sport as a whole is under-marketed. hopefully that changes with USCR/TUSCC.

 

I was there Saturday (a very generous friend shared some BMW/Porsche hospitality suite passes) and the attendance looked reasonable for what ALMS/WEC is. The problem is that the event is stretched out over 2 days, and you can get a taste of racing just being there for a single event. I know of a lot of people, including myself, who just went on sat for the first race ALMS race. And keep in mind COTA has no idea how to promote these events. Funny that most people I talk to, including non-car enthusiasts, "don't like" cota because of all the social media hub-ub around the club racing/DE stuff earlier this year. The owners/management are more famous than the events they host.

 

first impressions matter....

 

I saw the ALMS COTA race on espn last weekend or so, the place looked completely empty on TV... There seemed to be more team personnel / trucks than fans, I was actually kind of surprised...