The IndyCar Series is very close to broadening its reach in a big way by adding a race in Brazil, the South American homeland of five of its regular drivers.
“I’m 90 per cent there,” Terry Angstadt, president of the Indy Racing League’s commercial division, said Saturday. “It’s that close, but we don’t confirm them until they’re signed.
“It’s summertime down there when it’s cold up here, so it’s great,” he said.
The prospect of heading out of the country has gotten mixed reviews among the drivers.
The Brazilian drivers, not surprisingly, seem to love the idea, while Danica Patrick and others wonder if the series would offend its core audience. The series already has two races scheduled in Canada and one in Japan, and has raced in the past in Australia.
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“Wherever I race, I’ll be excited to go to each event,” Patrick said. “But, I think that it’s also important to think about your core audience and that’s here in America. To leave and go to another country and be in another time zone and miss the national news exposure, I think, is a risk, but I don’t really know the situation and there might be a lot of reward.”
Scott Dixon, a native of New Zealand, thinks it’s a great idea.
“It’s definitely an area that you’ve got to look at,” he said after qualifying Friday. “The series gets a lot more money to run at venues like that and that helps the racing and helps the series and helps the drivers. It helps everybody.”
Helio Castroneves and Tony Kanaan, two of the most popular drivers, love the idea.
“That’s what the series needs and being a Brazilian, I’m very happy to go race in my country and hopefully we can do that,” Kanaan said, with Castroneves echoing his words.
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