Attendance

[indycool]

I'm posting this without comment to see what others might think.

http://www.sportsbusinessnews.com/in...story_id=22556

[Liz]

No comment. I'm sure Brock Yates will write about this soon, though.

[Jay]

You can play around with whatever figure you like, but the fact remains that the Miami event was a huge success, and the city, organizers and Cart are enthusiastically working together to make it bigger and better for 2003!

[Snrub]

Before reading that article, I alread felt that CART exagerates its attendance at races. I'm not terribly upset about it though. CART has to portray an image of strength to keep the series going.

[Jay]

I would think the packed grandstands would be evidence enough of the success of their events. And as I said before, regardless of what those figures show, which are just as likely to have been fabricated as the ones Car uses, the Miami event, and others are huge successes with all parties involved excited about 2003.

(OK, there is one party that's unhappy about the Miami race, which would do ANYTHING to see it leave, and that group is ISC)

[f1manoz]

Who's to say the IRL don't fabricate their figures? Oh, that's right, THAT series is perfect.

CART has packed grandstands nearly everywhere it visits. Who cares if the numbers are slightly wrong? There are people at the track, usually lots of them. THAT is what counts.

[Liz]

No, the other guys just don't put out any figures. But a marshall who had been to many of their races told me that usually the non-race-day "crowds" could be numbered in the hundreds.

Who ever gets the crowd figures correct anyway? The so-called "Million Man March" was about 10,000 according to the police on the scene.

[The Snout]

What was the Gold Cost attendence numbers again ? It's doesn't really matter if it's 40000 instead of 200 000, it pumps 50 million dollars into the local economy and that's what the measure of success is. How much did the IRL Yamaha 400 at Fontana bring in again for locals ? Seems even with Champcar with one knee on the canvas and blood spilling out, people are still scared of it's populatiry punch......they should be.

[Crash Test]

Last year the Gold Coast crowd was about 298,000 for the four days, but I feel that was a great underestimate... I know in years past, the Thursday and Friday crowds would be every part of the weekend crowd, but that was never the case on the offical count.

[Jay]

I also know that for events like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, the races are weeklong events, with attractions around town from celebrity parties, charity events, atheltic events etc, all of which generate their own revenue. Really, for these cities the value of the Cart race can't be underestimated.

[Liz]

Last year the CWS race was estimated to have put $29 million into the Toronto economy. I had occasion to research this to write a rebuttal to a whine by someone from another town who thought the race should be cancelled because it made Toronto (where he did not live) too hard to get around!

And Jay and anyone else who was at the race in Montreal this year will confirm that we could not have packed anyone else into the grounds without risking someone getting trampled or the drivers not being able to get their cars onto the grid at all.

[The Snout]

After all the criticism Cart and it's fans have had to put up with from people leaving the series, the media, IRL hit and runs forum users, we Cart fans don't really give a toss anymore what trashing articles are written about Cart. We've heard it before so play another record.

What these people don't understand about the Cart fan at the moment is the more negative things we see written about Cart the more we are supporting Cart.

It's a hike for me to go to the Surfers Paradise race and I wasn't going to go this year, but after all the s*hit that has been levelled at Cart and trying to make it look so bad, it's guaranteed that I'll be buying a couple of seats at the event this year for sure. My resolve to support the series has be cemented by all the mudslinging, and I'll support the series the best way I or anyone can, by getting to an event.

No one can stop the media or anyone else from continuing the attacks on Cart's character, but like any people who are being marginalised they are just making Cart fans stand up for their sport all the more. One thing the events of the last 8 months has done is unite the Cart fans who love the sport into fighting for it to the death. So bring on your articles of doom and propaganda, with each one you sell more seats at each Cart event, you've already sold 2 to me.

[botsquad]

Originally posted by indycool
http://www.sportsbusinessnews.com/in...story_id=22556

from the article:
In contrast, the IRL recorded 1,160,476 fans for a 15-race season, with only race-day attendance count


comment: 1.16 million, approx half of which were from one race....of course.

comment: what about the other 14 races...
comment: how many free passes in japan? just about all of them i expect.

[sgw2]

Truth is all counts are bogus, whether you are talking CART or IRL. IRL gets its' biggest crowds (outside of Indy) are at NASCAR tracks where the tickets are prt of a package. CART gets its' best crowds in city races where the majority of fans are festival goers. Then they inflate the gate. They do so because the counters have a vested interest in claiming higher numbers.

When the auditor comes in, like at Miami, the results are embarrassing. Suddenly a crowd of 85,000 (must have been for the three days) deflates to 14,100 paid customers. At surfers CART's huge increase came over 100% from the Thursday crowds which saw no Champcars, only Aussie V8 Super Cars. And on it goes. All it says IMHO is don't trust the gate numbers given by the promoters, because they lie.

Goodyear used to give estimates -also inflated- but they stopped doing so. CART was one of the parties pressing them to inflate the numbers even more. So Goodyear quit, because it became something people were using to close business deals.

The truth is both series are having great difficulty getting a solid following. Their TV numbers are very similar low 1.1 range. You can't spin that. They suck for both IRL and CART.

CART is trying to get around its' unpopularity by adding street races figuring it builds in a crowd (e.g., the Trios-Rivieres weekend drew the same for Atlantics only as it did for Atlantics plus GARRA or Atlantics plus ALMS). IRL is trying to get aroud its' unpopularity by doing two-for-one ticket deals at NASCAR tracks.

Truth is only NASCAR is popular.

[jetsetter]

I personally think you won't find a sport around that doesn't fudge the figures to some degree. In Australia with aggressive competition between certain sports it is common place to lift the figures just a little higher so my guess would be if CART lied about their crowds you can bet the IRL did to.

[DNQ]

All I know is when I watch CART, the stands are full...

And I know if you had an IRL race here in Australia, you'd be lucky to see 20,000 people turn up...

[Crash Test]

Dunno, depends what the situation around the race is. How many people turned up to the Adelaide ALMS race to see the INXS concert? For that matter, how many people turned up to the 1991 Surfers race. Back then, there were literally grand stands EVERYWHERE and they were all empty... After that they chopped a lot of grandstands away and crowds were still fairly poor until Nigel came on the scene.

[indycool]

Okay, I started this to see what people thought and I found out.

There is one simple truth to this: Don't lie. Either announce reasonable figures or shut up.

It has not been unusual in history for the IRS to say to a sporting-event promoter, "you announced 100,000 people, yet your revenue statement shows this, so where's our cut?" Given the memo referred to, Miami's likely to get this.

It has not been unusual in history for promoters to get caught by a media person who hires a couple kids to go count seats. Then, after the big announcement of attendance, the media rep asks the question, "well, you only have 25,000 seats, how can you announce 100,000 for a three-day weekend." Then, attendance numbers become a HUGE story, THE story. Cleveland's really due for this to happen.

In the case of a public company, attendance means dollars in the co-promotions and dollars must be reflected in the financial reports. What happens when a shareholder reads, in a public document, where MPH lost $5 million and guaranteed a $2 million loan on top of it to the Miami promoter, then goes to the SEC and asks, "where's the money" and starts a stockholder suit for misrepresentation. Same for the shareholder who says, "you announced 2.6 million people, where's the money?"

And there are some on forums with the thought that, "geez, CART's drawing all these people and the promoters are pleading poverty and asking for Pookfare, this doesn't equate." It doesn't. Ask Portland.

Maybe I should've said up front I'm not a Pook fan, as I've stated many times. Lying's one reason.

[Liz]

As I mentioned above, crowd inflation is not any more unusual than grade inflation or resume inflation. The "Million Man March" was closer to 10,000 than a million. The police count of anti-war protests is usually about 10% of what the presenters claim. And I was involved in an anti-protesters protest once in which an accurate count was done (on purpose -- we all passed through a particular checkpoint after the rally) and there were 1,646 of us. We hand-counted Jane Fonda's out of town gang and there were 77 of them. Camera angles made her group look as if it contained the "hundreds" she claimed, but after our leadeship pointed out the truth, they went back to Detroit and we never saw them again.

I believe the estimates the marshalls have given me, as they are used to making an accurate count. But personally I don't care about these things; I leave that to the bookkeepers. If there are so many people in the paddock that nobody can move, that's a crowd. I'm not going to ask them to swear an affidavit as to why they turned up.

[racer69]

Originally posted by DNQ
All I know is when I watch CART, the stands are full...

And I know if you had an IRL race here in Australia, you'd be lucky to see 20,000 people turn up...

Would the stands be full if the CART race was at Sandown or QR rather than the Coast though?

On topic, no matter what category it is, faking thr crowd figure isn't on, who gains from inflating the crowd figures?

[Jay]

I don't know about the races around the US, but I really don't think the crowd numbers for the Canadian races were inflated at all. In fact, there was one rumour that the montreal attendance figure was kept intentionally low as not to embaress the F1 people (even though it still would have been a good 100k off the F1 3 day attendance mark). And the figures they give for Toronto sound very accurate if you compare it to the crowds for baseball and hockey games there.

[moffman]

Champ Car racing is the best open wheel racing category by a very long margin, anybody disagree?