This time of year is a hectic one for sports spectators in the United States. Baseball just concluded its Fall Classic, the denouement of a long summer spent at ballparks across the country. Football, both professional and collegiate, enters the heart of the season as teams vie for position in the standings and the polls.
This time of year is a hectic one for sports spectators in the United States. Baseball just concluded its Fall Classic, the denouement of a long summer spent at ballparks across the country. Football, both professional and collegiate, enters the heart of the season as teams vie for position in the standings and the polls.
Lost amid the deafening buzz of these high-profile pastimes, Formula One returns to America on Nov. 18, when the top tier of international auto racing reinstates the United States Grand Prix to the schedule at the new Circuit of the Americas track in Austin, Tex. The return is a welcome one, but it was hardly a given.
Five years ago, it seemed that F1 had left the country for good after Indianapolis Motor Speedway hosted its final version of the U.S. Grand Prix. We tend to think of these and other iconic sporting events as permanent, immovable fixtures on our sports calendars, but the reality is that popularity in sports ebbs and flows, and when a sport wanes in popularity, we are apt to forget its history.
For four decades, F1 was as popular as any other form of auto racing in the United States. At least one race in the F1 season was held on American soil every year from its inception in 1950 until the early 1990s. From 1976 until 1984, ours was the only country with multiple dates on the calendar. And then it vanished, first with the dissolution of Phoenix’s version of the U.S. Grand Prix in 1991 and, later, the Indianapolis version, which ran from 2000 to 2007.
Exposure is essential for the survival of any sport. When fans have no opportunity to watch an event, they naturally find others to occupy their time. The decline of F1 in America is not merely the result of market saturation by NASCAR and other professional racing options, but also a lack of focus in presenting viewers with a top-shelf motorsports experience.
Part of the reason races never succeeded in Phoenix or Indianapolis—or for that matter Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas or Long Beach—is that they raced on courses shoehorned into meeting F1 specifications. Even Watkins Glen, which hosted the U.S. Grand Prix from 1961 to 1980, suffered from its reduced length and insufficient maintenance.
F1 racing never lacked intrigue for U.S. audiences, it merely lacked the proper arena—until now. The Circuit of the Americas provides a made-for-F1 course on American soil for the very first time. No longer relegated to racing on inadequate street courses or modified preexisting tracks, F1 now has an American track to rival Europe’s legendary courses.
When showcased properly, even sports with far less footing in the U.S. than F1 have experienced a meteoric rise. The most obvious example of this transition is soccer, the most popular sport by far in nearly every country in the world but the U.S. The 1994 World Cup in America deserves much of the credit for generating the interest that turned soccer into a mainstream sport on our shores. Without the success of that tournament, Major League Soccer would have been a pipe dream instead of the viable sports league that it is today.
With the World Cup, a generation of fans was introduced to a sport that had been a muted blip on the American radar for decades. Few domestic sports pages ran soccer scores 20 years ago; now you can turn on the television on Saturdays and Sundays and watch live matches from all around the globe.
F1 didn’t die in the United States because it lacked for interest. The sport faded from public consciousness because, unlike the grand superspeedways of NASCAR, it had no legitimate venue to house its competitions on American soil. Subjected to subpar conditions that hampered world-class competition, fans turned elsewhere for entertainment.
The loss of the U.S. Grand Prix five years ago reminded us that no sporting event is guaranteed residence on our screens and in our hearts. If four decades of history and tradition can be lost, then every event is vulnerable. But the rebirth of F1 in Austin also illustrates that, under the right conditions and with a dedicated effort, even off-the-radar sports can reawaken their past glories.
