dr-baker wrote:coops wrote:Klon wrote:each team in F1 would race under a different flag, a true world championship.
We've had that. It didnt live up to expectations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1_Grand_Prix
It lived up to my expectations. Its problem is that it didn't meet the expectations of its investors (i.e. didn't make a profit quickly enough).
The other main problem was that the series didn't live up to the expectations, or the pre-conceived ideas of the press. The problem is, modern motorsports are generally focussed around the personalities and qualities of a driver. The marketing of the teams often revolves around their drivers - not just in Formula 1 (e.g. Sebastian Loeb in the World rally Championship) - and the media likes to look at the human drama of drivers fighting against each other, both on and off the track. For a number of fans, it is much more involving to be cheering for a driver first, and a team second, since it is easier in a way to identify with an individual compared to a company.
A1GP didn't really fit the bill in that respect, since it was about nations racing - so the image of the driver was, ultimately, subsumed by that of the team he raced for. Additionally, there is the problem that, when it comes to single seater racing, Formula 1 is so high profile in Europe, Australasia and the Americas that any other form of single seater racing is effectively driven out. And if you want to compete in the open wheeler market, there are a lot of rival operations, a number of which have major backing from either manufacturers or from the FIA and FOM - GP2, for example. The A1GP teams really didn't have that much of a public character beyond the national branding, and being a spec series, the cars had no more of an individual character either.
Moreover, being a privately financed series, the lack of any major recognisable brands would have made the series even less prominent to a casual fan - there is no familiar name to 'hook' you and make you interested in the series. Coupled to that, Teixeira's reputation was not great, if we are honest, and that did not help dispel fears about funding (and given later allegations of financial impropriety, might have driven away funding), and the track listing wasn't always the best - they didn't use many high profile tracks.
All in all, whilst it may have been a nice idea (although I prefer a sport where talent does not have to be constrained by nationality in an artificial way, like the A1GP series), it wasn't going to be easy to establish the series as a credible rival to existing major motorsport series, like Formula 1, the Le Mans series and so forth (as the organisers wanted to pitch it as a world class event, on a level with those series).
) mentioned the same fact when applied to catastrophes. You'd expect catastrophes to be normally distributed in time and space, and actually they tend to come in clusters, apparently without things being related. The maths was extremely complex (i.e., I didn't get it) but the punchline was, if you get hit by an earthquake, chances are in a couple of weeks a typhoon will come along to help matters.
