The NTT IndyCar series has announced the results of a large-scale fan survey that was conducted last year, which ranged across nearly every talking point of America’s premiere open wheel series.
The survey, which was conducted by Nielsen and Motorsport Network, was heavily pushed by the series and by many drivers and teams, resulting in over 53,000 individual responses. There were results gathered from 147 different countries, and in 11 different languages.
The overall finding reaffirms what many who follow IndyCar already knew, that the series is healthy and is growing. Overall fan approval of the racing product was very high, and ‘competitive’ and ‘exciting’ were two of the most used descriptors.
The findings also include a look into the demographic of the fans that follow the series. 88 percent of respondents were male, which is not as balanced as series organizers would like. However, it was the second largest percentage of female responses from any survey of a global motorsports series conducted by Motorsports Network in last five years.
The survey showed that 28 percent of fans have been following for less than five years, which points to a healthy influx of new interest. In Europe that new interest is even higher, with over half of fans finding the series in the past five years.
Nearly half of fans that follow the series participate in some form of gaming weekly, making that an avenue that the series will focus on going forward. That initiative includes the release of a dedicated IndyCar Series video game, which is in development for release in 2023.
On the other end of the spectrum, there is also still a healthy interest in attending races in person. Over 80 percent expressed a desire to attend a race live, and over half said they had been to a race in the past five years.
IndyCar’s accessibility has been a feature for quite some time, and it seems fans know they can easily get up close and personal with their favorite cars and drivers if they attend a race weekend.
The survey also found that fans are generally happy with the series’ current distribution of track types, with the street, road course, and oval mix showcasing each driver’s talent in multiple disciplines.
Fans were also strongly against changing the current race formats, with open criticism towards the ideas of stage racing or inverted qualifying sessions.
Team Penske was voted as the favorite team, though Andretti Autosport and Arrow McLaren SP were close behind. Not surprisingly, F1 convert Romain Grosjean was voted as the favorite driver by a large margin.
However, nearly ten percent of fans stated they had no favorite driver, and almost a quarter voted for drivers not part of the top ten on the popularity list. This seems to indicate that many fans like the racing product itself more than they enjoy following a particular driver or team.
For those that want to dive into all the details of the findings, full results of the extensive survey can be found at this link (PDF).
Formula 1 needs to do a survey like this.
They do.
The survey refers to Watkins Glen as if it’s a current annual venue. There hasn’t been an Indycar race @ Watkins Glen since it was the Indy Racing League, how many years ago? As I said in my response to the survey, the Indy Car schedule is incomplete without an annual Watkins Glen weekend. Easily one of the most historic venues, The Glen “restarted” road racing after WWII in 1948 , hosted 20 consecutive F1 races, and still has The Six Hours for IMSA, NASCAR, and easily one of the biggest & best Vintage weekends with SVRA. A few hours drive for a ~20,000,000 population from the Northeast US, & Canada, in one of the most picturesque parts of the world with the Finger Lakes, and attendant rolling hills, vineyards, wineries, and world class epicurian delights, it is unfathomable that it isn’t an Indy Car staple. The survey says it aspires to European growth. It is safe to say if there’s one track Europeans are familiar with in America, it’s Watkins Glen, because it was part of the F1GP Circuit for so long. In the hopes that my idol, Roger Penske sees this and is swayed by it, I’ll contact my 3-400,000 friends that I used to go there with in the ’70’s to see The CanAm/Six Hours, to make it worth his while! (Of course, we all
reassembled for The F1 weekend, a few months later.)
Not sure the current crop of F1 fans that Liberty have attracted have any idea what Watkins Glen is. Those kids are a far cry from F1 fans of 10-20 years ago.
Big shock, women don’t care about auto racing. The genuine shocker however is so many people actually like Grosjean, who was not only a horrible driver in F1, but also very unlikeable and problematic.