December has begun and there was some racing after all. I completely forgot about the 25 Hours of Thunderhill, which reminds me that the Gulf 12 Hours is coming up. Besides that endurance race, there was a dirt race inside a dome in St. Louis and it attracted a few notable names. Meanwhile, NASCAR had an award show. Lewis Hamilton had an accident on a motorcycle at Jerez. Tom Kristensen and Johan Kristofferson will team up for the Race of Champions. Scott Dixon has a mustache. Here is a run down of what got me thinking.
Head-to-Heads
This May saw a monumental decision in the United States when the Supreme Court ruled a federal ban on sports betting violated the rights of the states open the door for sports gambling to be legalized across the country. A few places were quick to legislate the practice. Delaware and New Jersey both signed bills within a month of the Supreme Court decision. Mississippi and West Virigina followed in August with New Mexico joining the club in October. The first legal sports books in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island opened in November.
Sports betting has not spread like the wildfire many thought it would. Many states are still working on legislation. Some states will be tougher to budge and Utah will never budge. More states will legislate it over 2019 and it will become more common across the country.
With the legalization, many people in many sports thought this is what it will take to get more viewers. Football's popularity is not just because of the cultural tie to the United States but because of gambling. It is spreads, money lines, teasers, parlays and prop bets. It is taking eight games and putting them on a ticket. Not everyone is a degenerate but enough tie their interest to the sport with money on the line.
If it works for football, other sports are thinking why couldn't it be the same for them and motorsports was no different then soccer, hockey, baseball and even golf in hoping gambling would bring interested eyes in finding a place to make money.
How were the first few months of legalized gambling for motorsports? It doesn't appear to have done much but there was one bright spot. The week of the Dover NASCAR race saw $52,629 wagered on NASCAR in Delaware compared to $53,286 from June 5th-September 30th. Not big numbers in terms of the four months leading up to the race but when it came time for the race itself, people opened up their wallets. It is not clear how the last two months did but I am sure many within and around motorsports wants to see the amount of money wagered to go up in 2019.
There is a problem with motorsports: It is not gambling friendly right now.
The one issue is when it comes to talking about motorsports gambling everyone looks to the odds for victory. It makes senses, who is going to win? Who are you going to put your money on to win? The problem is you aren't likely to win an outright bet on the winner. In NASCAR, it is one driver out of 40 that wins. In IndyCar, it is one of maybe two-dozen drivers. The odds are not in your favor and even if you spread the money around over four or five drivers the payout might not be high enough to make all your money back.
Motorsports can be friendlier to gamblers and the casual fan. There has to be more options than just betting on the overall winner and there are.
Motorsports is built for prop bets. An over/under can be set on number of cautions, number of caution laps, lead changes, longest green flag run, cars on the lead lap and so on. All those categories would keep people interested from start to finish. You don't know how many cars will finish on the lead lap until the checkered flag. What happens if the over/under was 15.5 and the leader ran out of fuel with half a lap to go and let five cars get back on the lead lap and brought the total to 16 lead lap finishers? What if the over/under on cautions as 5.5 and there is a spin on the final lap and the sixth caution comes out? Those with money on it would stick around. They aren't going to turn away and think it is money in the bag. Gamblers will watch until they know they definitely are a winner or loser.
But there has to be more than prop bets. Prop bets are the additional side bets. There needs to be bets that take into account the race itself and if betting on the overall winner is too unfavorable then there has to be an alternative and I think that is head-to-head betting.
Head-to-head betting takes one race and turns it into ten or a dozen or twenty different battles to keep an eye on. Instead of having to pick one winner, you could pick five or nine or 15 winners. Instead of picking one or two or five drivers and have them run eighth, 12th, 20th and the rest retire from the race, that battle for 12th could matter.
I think head-to-head betting is what could increase interest from gamblers and potentially increase viewing and I think the series should get on board and provide the match ups themselves. Instead of having the casinos set the match ups, a series could do it each week and in a crazy way turn a race into like other sports where we know the match ups going into a Sunday. These match ups could be weekly talking points.
The way I envision it is a series, whether its NASCAR or IndyCar, would have to set a schedule before the first race of the season and make it a random draw. The problem is drivers can rotate so these would have to be based on entrant and likely for these series, the entries remain pretty consistent week to week. With the charter system in NASCAR, we know 36 teams that will be there each week. In IndyCar, the leader circle program means about 20 teams are going to be there every week. What some fans view as a problem for both series could be beneficial when it comes to setting head-to-head match ups.
The match ups might have to be limited to those entries but it would provide for a season-long system.
Let's use IndyCar as the example...
Let's say there are 20 leader circle entries, those 20 entries could be drawn against each another at the start of the season and each weekend would have a different match up. It could be set up so every race has a different match up before hand or it could be structured like other sports with a regular season and then a playoff with a bracket and all.
The IndyCar schedule is 17 races and it could be broken into a 14-race regular season with the final three weeks used for a playoff system. The 20 entries could be broken down into two groups of ten and every entry could race each other once with five entries competing twice or five interdivisional match ups and the top four from each division would advance to the playoffs or it could be one table for 20 entries with everyone facing a different entry over the first 14 races and the top eight after 14 races advance to the playoffs.
The same thing could happen in NASCAR. With 36 charters it is possible that each team could get each other once and the final race of the season could have the top two entries paired to decide a champion or NASCAR could break the entries up into two groups of 18 and have every entry face each other twice and the top two from each group could meet in the semifinal in the 35th race and the 36th race would be the final.
There are plenty of ways to do this but if the series jumped on board and made it a thing it could bring in a new type of fan. Imagine if you knew at the start of the season that two entries were going to be meeting in a head-to-head match up weeks in advance. It would be different and you could watch a race differently.
This proposal seems revolutionary but we could have our cake and eat it too. We could keep the traditional model of a points system and the race winner gets the most and keep that championship structure but simultaneously we could have another format and have a championship within a championship if you will and it could be one that is promoted.
Each race could have its own bit of drama different from the one before it and it could give us something to look forward to beforehand. Imagine if we knew going to Road America it was Will Power vs. Scott Dixon and Alexander Rossi vs. Josef Newgarden. What if in NASCAR we knew it was going to be Kyle Busch vs. Kevin Harvick heading into Bristol or Joey Logano vs. Martin Truex, Jr. heading into Dover?
I think the series need to get on it and promote head-to-head betting because I do not think casinos will go out of their way to do it each week. It is easier to set the odds for the overall winner and take most of the money because there will only be one winner each week but if head-to-head match ups were already provided for the casinos and they didn't have to create them then it would be simple for them and all that would have to be done would be to set a money line or even a spread with one entry being a 6.5-position favorite or another being a two position underdog.
It would give people a new way to watch a race and in a way could make it more fun for viewers. Instead of focusing on the leader, the focus could be on the battle for eighth or it could come down to whether a driver could overcome a 9.5-position spread and need to make up that one more position. We would still have the race itself but also have these individual match ups to keep an eye on.
For the last decade, motorsports has lost fans. I don't know if it is because of NASCAR's constant changes or IndyCar's rough television deal or a cultural change and youths not being interested in cars because the automobile has become an appliance and costs for insurance, gas and so on have made it unappealing to a younger generation that can piss in a breeze and hit 25 other cheap thrills that do not need the use of an automobile but this emphasis on head-to-head match ups could be the change needed without changing the structure of a race at all. Instead of adding stages, playing with aero packages and tweaking the championship structure so the title is not decided until the final race the one thing that could be done is take what already exists and accentuate it with additional things to watch for besides the race for P1.
If legalized gambling is where motorsports series think they can attract more attention and grow the fan base then the potential lays at the feet of these series to be different but at the same time maintain its identity.
Winners From the Weekend
The #74 Toyo Tires Flying Lizard Motorsports Porsche of Johannes van Overbeek, Wolf Henzler, Justin Marks, Charlie Hayes and Andy Wilzoch won the 25 Hours of Thunderhill.
Christopher Bell won the Gateway Dirt Nationals midget race. Bobby Pierce won the late model race and Mike Harrison won the dirt modified race.
Coming Up This Weekend
The Asian Le Mans Series has its second round of the season at Fuji.
The Andros Trophy season kicks off from Val Thorens.
Covering All Motorsports. From Indianapolis to Le Mans, Daytona to Monaco.
