What About Miami? What About Miami?

[SurfaceUnits]

Q: I was wondering if you could elaborate a little more on the Miami race and why you guys are not going to purchase the assets?

PG: First of all, I don’t know how long you have been in Miami as a reporter but I have raced there a long time and it’s a wonderful event and we love going there. We made a business decision based on the infrastructure and overhead costs of having a race in the center of an urban environment as it was. We’d love to be in Miami, we want to be back there, we want to race there, you just have to be in a spot that we can be reasonable about costs. We’re investigating some sites and we’ve had serious discussions about it and we think that it’s valid but we just couldn’t justify the purchase of those assets considering their obligations.

Q: What would it take to bring a race back to Miami?

PG: Having a street race is great, but it really ties up a great part of the city and it compromised the race track so we first of all need a place where we can make a temporary circuit that is fun for the fans, easy to get to and exciting for the competitors. We need to get that done, then we need to balance the income side. The old race that was held adjacent to the current race location was a great race track. It had high speeds, had good access and didn’t tie up a great deal of the city so we could adjust on some comprises as the city can. We were just put under the burden of having too many.

[codename_47]

Hmmm...I'm glad that he notices the need to stage an actual Street RACE, and not a Parade...

I hope this means they're putting in a lot of thought to that no matter WHERE they go from now on!

[gttouring]

i hope they do make improvement to existing road (street) courses and any new ones that come up, it would be a shame if they made this a parade series, like laguna seca- it needs more passing room or a new wing confiduration for that track, less downforce to force braking manouevers?
long beach needs to be widened in a few places, st.pete is great so far, so is cleaveland and toronto, vancouver is good liek LBGP, but needs to be widend or something

[GTRMagic]

Originally posted by codename_47
Hmmm...I'm glad that he notices the need to stage an actual Street RACE, and not a Parade...

I hope this means they're putting in a lot of thought to that no matter WHERE they go from now on!

Solely driven by the almighty dollar.... I wonder if the OWRS management team will be aggressive in keeping cornerstone events?

[norman-normal]

If PG is "solely driven by the almighty dollar" he would not have become a race car driver.

Judged from my expirence, most tracks are not layed out by drivers, often it's a vicarious exercise of would-bees.

PG has a powerfull voice in OWR, particularly in this regarde.

I expect very good judgement.

[Snrub]

We've got to be realistic, OWRS has to be able to reduce the hemorage of money. PG has portrayed their goals as making CART more business-like because that's what they'll have to do. Make no mistake, despite the public comments the series cannot run without subsidization to the teams in 2004. They will not be profitable in the short term and they no it. If anything the OWRS guys have been very non-business oriented with their promises to keep most of the events that lost them money.