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).