Comments on: An Olive Branch Or Power Play? http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/ Speed is Life Fri, 24 May 2013 16:10:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: SkipinSC http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6684 Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:56:25 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6684 I suspect that a lot of this is needless worry. As I posted to Defender’s blog, Tony Geroge has only one useful purpose in the whole equation and that is as the head of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

In all things having to do with the operation of the physical plant at 16th and Georgetown, he has shown his grandfather’s brilliance in continuing to upgrade the facility to kleep up with the times. Several friends noted to me that last year, (with TG out of the picture) some of the maintenance had slipped a bit.

My guess is that Josie George noticed this and realized that her brother DOES know how to take care of IMS and that money spent toward that end is money WISELY spent.

I don’t want to go into a rehash of all that has already happened; that would serve NO purpose at all. But, the one thing NO ONE can say is that Tony George has done anything that has hurt the Speeddway in terms of the physical plant. That remains the one area where TG has fulfilled his grandfather’s legacy.

]]> By: E46 styling http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6673 Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:46:00 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6673 Tony George FTW

]]> By: JohnMc http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6672 Tue, 01 Mar 2011 02:40:13 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6672 People can say what they want about Robin Miller, but he seems to always be on top of the situation. I think he is right and, if so, I can’t take another screw-up and hearing that “33 is just a number.” TG took us to a spec series and the fans left. As for protecting Indy, I never did buy that. It is the Indianapolis 500 and if the drivers and teams were to strike then someone else will pull into Gasoline Alley and enter. It is, after all, The Indianapolis 500 and that race is what AOW is all about. It starts and ends there.

]]> By: JHall14 http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6671 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:49:47 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6671 Let’s all stop and think for a minute. CART..ie Pat Patrick & Roger Penske ultimately started this sh*% after Mr.Hulman’s death. Now they are the forgotten ones, yet glorified upon their return. Yet we are not sure if they grew balls or not, they surely did not have them while Mr. Hulman lived.After many years,TG acted to protect the family “Jewel”. We all would respond in the same way. Robin Miller, while he does place the sport in the public eye, vilifies everyone who does not agree with him. This is a wait and see period. TG is no dummy, but I cannot speak whether this is a “power play” or not. Time will tell, just like the balls that eventually grew on Patrick & Penske later in life.

]]> By: Mike Rice http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6669 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:26:00 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6669 You’re right about the voice/vote,redd. I’m hopeful that he will have that clear a view of what’s made the series begin to take off again. Regarding realistic, yeah, that’s true, and I never expected that it would be otherwise. Were it his voice alone among the board of Mom and the sisters, it would be fine. It’s the three cronies he’s brought along that really troubles me, because as you know that mkaes eight, with a likely minimum of four going the same direction every time. All they need to do is persuade one of the other family members to vote the same way, and you have a TG led majority. In light of what Miller reported about the attempt to purchase the series last year, it seems that Tony still has a lot on his mind about who should be at the helm of the ship.

]]> By: billytheskink http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6668 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:24:31 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6668 What really baffles me about TG’s return to Hulman & Co. is how the rest of (or enough of) the Hulman-George clan apparently does not see how badly this can reflect the series.
Even if TG ventures no farther than the H&C board, he’s back in the picture in the minds of fans, of team owners, of manufacturers and sponsors… What effect will this have on Randy Bernard’s leverage with these parties? That certainly remains to be seen, but I think even the best-case scenario is not a positive one.

The particularly sad thing about this is that, while I don’t believe it’s imminent or even extremely likely, if the scenario outlined in Miller’s column comes true it won’t surprise most of us die-hard open wheel fans one bit.

]]> By: redd http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6667 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:28:33 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6667 Mike, I just meant a voice in the way that the sisters have a voice, no more than that. I think it would be unrealistic to expect TG to be completely hands-off. Maybe the first thing he could do to help the situation is to “voice” his firm support of Randy Bernard as CEO of Indycar.

]]> By: Bent Wickerbill http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6665 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 18:01:04 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6665 It is not a matter of hate, it is a matter of historical, American open wheel fact…. TG’s sales pitch at the outset of the IRL may have sounded pretty, but it’s ultimate purpose was a power grab. A power grab that nearly destroyed American open wheel racing. I believe that TG indeed has a passion for racing, he just shouldn’t be any where near the drivers seat….

]]> By: Mike Rice http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6664 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:55:23 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6664 I can only hope, in the midst of all the buzz about this, that perhaps TG himself might “hear” how dreadfully concerned fans of the now-revived series are. And that this, in turn, might heighten his awareness of how poorly viewed the series was during his reign…both during the war with CART/CCWS, and after the merger.
Unlike many who’ve written before about Tony “winning” that war, it really was a situation where two fighters had so bloodied each other and were both so punchdrunk and staggering that for the first time since prior to the split, the powers in charge finally saw the only hope of survival for this form of racing was in reunifying. Even that looked grim, a “too-little, too-late” stench hanging over it as the series (under TG’s leadership) was still floating the whole thing on the Hulman family’s nickel.
I’ll give TG credit for being able/willing to hold out an olive branch to the CCWS teams when they got together again. But that still didn’t equate to having the marketing and promotional savvy to raise the series back up to the level it was prior to the split. It just put it all in the control of the one who’d shown clearly that he did NOT have the ability to run what once was the top-tier of racing in the U.S. He’d had 13 years of running the series prior to the merger without developing it (with the trump card of the 500) into what it was supposed to have become from the outset. One may argue that CART/CCWS was leaching that potential growth from the IRL, but the facts are that even when the biggest teams defected from CART to IRL (only because of the sponsor attention to the Speedway) the series still didn’t show a growth in popularity as CART had from 1980-1995. That was primarily due to a poorly run series with poor managment ideas for promotion/marketing.
As George said in this post, it’s Randy B. who’s given the series (and us) a glimmer of hope that the future can be good for the series. Supposedly that’s what TG wanted all along. If he can’t recognize that the positives for the future all began because of changes made since he lost his control, and he has a ‘vision’ about how great he can make it if he gets back in there, then it truly is a very gloomy situation. I agree with pretty much everything redd said (as I typically do), but the part about TG having a voice in the future of the series scares the hell outta me. If it were just “a” voice, maybe. But he’s shown before that he wants to have/be “the” voice…and his posse coming along with him doesn’t bode well for him being just one of the Board.

]]> By: Steve K http://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6663 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:51:01 +0000 https://oilpressure.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/an-olive-branch-or-power-play/#comment-6663 Hopfully Bernard will at least be around for the 2012 season so we can all enjoy it. I figured he was doing too well anyway and some other company, in sports or not, would grab him up.

]]>