A few folk like it (some say its a criminal offence because some people do nasty things to ducks), but a lot of others are quite happy with NASCAR, the motorsport equivalent of burger and fries. In culinary terms that would be foie gras aux truffes.
F1 is still what the Americans might call “a gourmet item”, which means it is foreign, expensive and rather exotic. This is one of the reasons that F1 has struggled in the United States, because sport is so very foreign and people from Kansas City don’t really know who to cheer for.
#Inside f1 racing 2017 hosted by hobbs in usa series#
This makes a lot of sense because in the autumn in the US the competition for live TV viewers is intense, with the mighty NFL and the NASCAR Play-Offs all happening at the same time, not to mention college football, which is huge.Īustin claims to be the “Live Music Capital of the World”, and perhaps it is, but then one can never be sure because the baseball world has a World Series that only allows US teams to play… It seems that people think the world ends when the US reaches the oceans on either side, and that there is nothing out there beyond the horizon. Having another music festival a week after this makes no sense at all, and adds to the argument that perhaps COTA really ought to look for a deal to run the race back-to-back with Montreal in June, and let Mexico become twinned with Brazil. In early October, Austin has a huge music festival called as Austin City Limits, which brings in 450,000 spectators over two three-day weekends. Bobby Epstein, the CEO of COTA, says that he wants the race weekend to become more of a music festival, but still centred on the Grand Prix. And, after trying with F1 alone, COTA reached out (don’t you hate that expression) to the world of music for help, shipping in Taylor Swift last year and Justin Timberlake this year to bump up the numbers and to try to generate new fans from their followers. This is really important in Texas because the State Government needs to justify its annual grant to the Circuit of the Americas and so there is pressure on the track to hit big targets. In my green notebook one of the first notes reads “258,000 over the three days”, which was the crowd figure, slightly down on last year, but still a very acceptable number. It was perfect.īut then, let’s face it, F1 is not exactly crammed with non-weird people, so Austin is a very popular venue. The people of Austin, Texas, pride themselves on being different and years ago, a local business alliance adopted the slogan “Keep Austin Weird”.
So what if your bartender has purple hair and a psychology degree? Who cares that on an election map the vast majority of Texas is Republican red, with just an island of Democratic blue around Austin. But this is Austin and Austin is meant to be weird. They even do weird stuff with pork bellies and scrambled eggs. It is a weird and wacky place where a very thin man called Daisy wanders around in multi-coloured clothing and a pork pie hat, taking orders for tofu, vegetable and nutritional yeast scrambles, served with hemp seed patties, and sweet potato hash, rather than the traditional corned beef version. It was brutal, but a visit to the local café in Austin (our hotel doesn’t have one) usually perks us up on the day after the Grand Prix. The rest of the F1 circus might be dancing at Pete’s Piano Bar (or wherever) but we worked through until dawn and then on to breakfast time. We crashed out our e-magazine GrandPrix+ in a little over six hours and then headed back to our hotel, stopping to buy remarkably unhealthy (and unappetising) food at a garage on the way home. This means that the pressure is on, with some forced to write reports as the race develops, in order to hit deadlines back home. With Austin being six hours to the west of the prime meridian, the deadlines that an F1 journalist faces at the United States Grand Prix are much shorter than for races that happen in the east, where one has extra time to get everything done.
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