I’m not convinced of this.
Superleague Formula, the crossover between motorsport and football, say they have a large amount of market research telling them that such a crossover is going to be a bit hit. They would say that, of course, or they wouldn’t have launched the series.
Now I’m not big fan of footie – except when England are playing, of course – but I’m sceptical. I know football fans will buy anything with their team logo on it but I’m not sure they’ll stick around if their team does not perform. Many are die-hard supporters but a great deal are not, they drift away when their team does badly and only fill the stadium when the team starts winning again.
I have no idea how this is going down in the football press – if indeed it is at all. I would be interested to hear more. Certainly the racing press is as sceptical as I am but they are also wary because they said the same things about A1GP, so they are giving SF the benefit of the doubt for the time being. A1GP was supposed to die halfway through the first season, it did not, sure it has huge financial problems but I believe it is improving and recovering – and I seriously doubt an operation like Ferrari would invest in a new car and engine for a dying championship.
Grand Prix Masters died instead, and that was supposed to be huge. Perhaps this says as much about the racing press as it does about the series concerned.
The first SF event will be held at Donington Park in less than a fortnight, interestingly the first A1GP group test will be held there just 9 days later so we may well get an intriguing laptime comparison should they choose to run on the same layout. I am going to research the teams running each ‘franchise’ (ugh, hate that word) and do a little preview when we are nearer the time. SF, like A1 before it, is starting off with known racing teams running each operation and like A1 perhaps the idea is that each franchise will later take over their own team.
The other point is that SF doesn’t seem to have run anything like the number of test miles as A1 has. Okay, A1 has done this before, but even then they ran a lot of miles. They still encountered problems in the first few races. SF are going to encounter some big teething problems.
The only thing two things impressing me about SF are the chassis based on the superb Panoz DP01 Champ Car, and two of the drivers, Robert Doornbos and Ryan Dalziel. The rest of the field are makeweights. As I say, I’ll run through them in a preview in a week or so.
The official website of SF is www.superleagueformula.com.
I Watch Too Much Racing 