tim wood

Eh, no. They’d have to dig down in some areas, but not the entire track. And they don’t ‘wait a year to have it settle’. They compact it a layer at a time with compacting rollers. This would take just days or […]

Gotcha. Thanks! I thought you were referring to COTA’s runoff.

Agree 100% Stef.

Re: the layout, it’s fantastic, minus the stadium section, but the current shareholders had nothing to do with the track’s design. Before he was forced out by current COTA boss Bobby Epstein, Tavo Hellmund […]

NASCAR is not COTA’s ‘cash cow’. COTA doesn’t even promote that race, i.e. it’s not ‘their’ race. SMI (owners of Texas Motor Speedway, owned by Bruton Smith) rents the track from COTA for that race, and SMI runs […]

They’re resurfacing about 40% of the track. By not resurfacing the whole track, they’re leaving the circuit with at least 5 surfaces of different ages (2012, 2019, early 2020, mid 2020, and 2022), different […]

Yep. The racing surface at COTA is a complete disaster.

Yep. Something that seems to be lost in all the hoopla over the USGP crowd is that there were no Canadian GP, Mexican GP, Brazilian GP, or USGP in 2020, and no Canadian GP in 2021 — so this was the first F1 GP […]

Re: the ‘Netflix Effect’, Yep. I believe there are multiple factors that formed a bit of a perfect storm that helped get a big crowd to Austin. I’ll be interested to see how next year goes, and 2023, as Ross […]

Dieter is correct to note here that this USGP crowd wasn’t the biggest ever F1 crowd. Indeed, it wasn’t even the biggest ever F1 crowd in the US!

Indy 2000 was much bigger, as were Adelaide 1995 and others. […]

Agree 100%. It’s sad.

Yeah, Jere, it’s not looking good, and now GP One is reporting that Austin will be replaced by Misano on the MotoGP calendar.

And check out this latest news that just dropped about an hour ago: Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is trying to ban mask mandates in Texas, has tested positive for COVID after attending a packed, maskless GOP event.

If it gets cancelled like last year’s GP, it’ll likely be one of the City of Austin, Travis County (not likely), or F1 (also not likely imho) who cancels it.

Now, if the City or F1 says COTA can have the race, […]

I believe Indy has already indicated they are not ready for a GP in 2021, but I won’t be at all surprised to see one there soon. Austin is in a mess with COVID and just getting worse. The number of infections in […]

Brazil simply wants to move back to their original date. They gave up their original date to accommodate Australia. Now Australia is cancelled.

Two races in Austin? I’m starting to have my doubts that there will even be one race here. The COVID-19 situation is bad in Austin, and is just getting worse. There is one ICU bed available in the 11-county Austin […]

It’s funny how he thinks there’s room for a 3rd GP – just as long as it’s Vegas and not Indianapolis.

This is the final year on COTA’s contract with F1. Penske is pumping massive money into Indy renovations and […]

Dieter, you wrote that COTA “sold the full allocation of 30% within five days”. What does that mean?

After the USGP cancellation, reports said USGP ticket sales had been up 250% before COVID hit. We knew that was a weird thing to say, because tickets had never gone on sale — so how could they have been selling […]