Edmonton Indy Is Toast For Now... Will It Stay Or Will It Go...??? Austin, Are You Listening...???

((HT: NBCSN/youtube))

The Edmonton Indy Car race is done until further notice after the current promoter, Octane, pulled out and the city says they won't find a replacement- and they'll eat the costs they fronted to make the race happen in the first place.

The last Indy, probably, left a sour taste in the mouth of everyone in Alberta province as relayed by the Edmonton Sun's Terry Jones:

"Colin Livingston pointed out, on the record, all the warning signs to your correspondent a week before the race in July.

"Livingston, owner of CanTorque, a business based in Edmonton, said what he was seeing bothered him greatly.

“There has been a great neglect in the marketing, promotion of the race is even worse than Northlands,” he said. “This year, specifically, it looks like they are trying to run the race for free. There appears to be next to no budget for promotion or marketing of this thing. They just operate the race. And they do a great job running the race. But my concern is there’s not going to be a race left here to operate.”

The big beef being that an outfit in eastern Canada was in no shape to run something in the west... and everyone in town seems to be right... There didn't seem to be any promotion, any signage, any advertising, or anything else that would make a race (a very popular race at that...) available to the city.

Jones seems to think Michael Andretti could step in like he did in Baltimore or Kevin Savoree who ran the Toronto Indy.

The HQ thinks that another city might have a stake in the future of that time slot... if they look at it hard enough... Austin, Texas and the Circuit of the Americas...

It would give the city another reason to claim a motorsports foothold in a series that is more North American than the overt corruption that seems to permeate the F1. And the HQ shudders at the thought of just how much money has gone F1's way to get a race to a college football town on a college football weekend the weekend before Thanksgiving. It reminds us of the IOC...

Who said that...???

The US Grand Prix will, no doubt, look pretty. Texans will make sure of it. But they really need to look to book the building for other clients and not just Bernie Ecclestone.

It just lends to too many questions in the long term instead of too many solutions to pay for the track...

Here's the last race from Edmonton- for now... until it ends up some place else...