Day: November 6, 2009

IZOD IndyCar Series

Congratulations to the Indy Racing League for securing a new sponsor for the IndyCar Series, which will henceforth be known as the IZOD IndyCar Series.

From all reports IZOD sound like a fantastic partner to work with, and not just reports from yesterday’s announcement but also from during this season where they were a personal sponsor for Ryan Hunter-Reay. I like the attitude and marketing style they appear to bring to the series. I say ‘appear’ because living here in the UK I had never heard of them before they came to the IRL.

The announcement was webcast live last night, unfortunately the usual gremlins crept in and the feed was very quiet at first, then lost sound before dying completely. This is not unusual for IndyCar.com live streams, either pressers or races, and Allen makes a fantastic suggestion on how to fix it – the IRL team have some really good ideas but their tech and implementation don’t seem to ever catch up, so imagine mixing those two groups of people.

So yeah, good news for the series which is finally starting to heal some of the old wounds of the past. First the reunion, now the sponsor, next.. the car?

Some have attempted to spin this as Tony George doing good. Ha. No. He is the cause of the mess we are only just crawling out of. We haven’t quite got to the ‘standing up and dusting ourselves down’ bit yet, but we will.

Anyway, good to have some positive news after what has been a bit of a negative week for the rest of motorsport.

Presumably this means the series acronym will now be IICS – for those not following closely, i.e. most reading this I presume, over the last 18 months or so they’ve been redefining ‘IRL’ to refer to the sanctioning body rather than the championship, so the series has sort of started to be called the ICS, for IndyCar Series. So we now have IRL IICS. Not catchy.. needs work.

Jeff Olson has a good piece over on AUTOSPORT.

EDIT – IndyCar.com has a nice landing page explaining it all, though unfortunately the main site underneath is still a mess and has auto-run video (it is video of the announcement though, so check it out).

F1 2009 for Wii and PSP

I’m getting excited about the new F1 2009 game coming out for the Wii.

I know, I know, it isn’t a ‘proper’ gaming system and F1 2010 for the PS3 / X-Box will be far better – but I don’t own either of those things and that game isn’t out in two weeks’ time.

This is the first officially-licensed F1 game to launch on a non-Playstation system for years (damn that Sony and their exclusivity deal) and even the last PS game was some 3yrs ago, so you can imagine a lot of us are getting quite excited!

Check out this video which explains how the game will appeal to novices and the experienced alike:

(that’s Anthony Davidson, BAR/Honda/BrawnGP test driver, alongside David Croft of BBC Radio 5 Live, and also quotes from a game developer)

I know, the Wii graphics are not stellar. I.Don’t.Care. I get to play an F1 game online without needing to bother spending hours on car setups, a pricey console or a proper wheel, or in the case of the PC I don’t have to worry about graphics cards and drivers and ‘will it run on my system?’. How cool is that?!

Of course, I almost certainly will spend hours on car setups and if they release a proper wheel I’ll probably get it… but that’s not the point. If I just want to pick up a controller and have a quick race against Button and Hamilton around Interlagos, I can. In 2 weeks time, I will.


Just to say this hasn’t been a paid piece or something done for a PR company, I did this off my own back because I’m genuinely looking forward to it.