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The Death of Drifting?
I hated history more than any other subject in high school. As I've gotten a little older and a great deal wiser, I've come to look at history as a great place to find lessons for the present and the future.
If you are a fan or participant in drifting, you should be very concerned about the future of your sport. For 2007, we heard that as many as seven different drifting series will be producing events. If we look back to history, there was a time when six different import drag racing series would compete for sponsor dollars, racers, media and spectators. Many believe that this was the primary cause for the decline in the popularity of professional import drag racing. The rationale is quite simple. With so many competing series, event producers receive less money than needed to properly produce and promote events. Trying to give their sponsors the best return, racers bankrupt themselves going to more events than they can actually afford to attend. The media tries to remain unbiased and cover everyone. In the end, the only way to be fair is to limit the coverage as there are too many events to cover. In the end, the spectators also lose. With less money being put into the promotion of events and racers being spread thin, the quality of the events suffer. Sometimes it only takes one poorly-produced drifting event to turn off potential drifting fans for life. Spectators also became less interested because there are just too many events going on.
If you are a manufacturer that is currently benefiting from the exposure delivered through drifting, here's some advice. Spend your drifting budget on the already established event series, dedicate a portion of your drifting budget to event promotion and limit the number of events that your sponsored racers will be attending. While we hope that our advice is taken, it's likely that it won't be and that this year will mark the end of the Golden Age of drifting in the U.S. Let's hope that we are wrong.
copied from Dsport magazine
I hated history more than any other subject in high school. As I've gotten a little older and a great deal wiser, I've come to look at history as a great place to find lessons for the present and the future.
If you are a fan or participant in drifting, you should be very concerned about the future of your sport. For 2007, we heard that as many as seven different drifting series will be producing events. If we look back to history, there was a time when six different import drag racing series would compete for sponsor dollars, racers, media and spectators. Many believe that this was the primary cause for the decline in the popularity of professional import drag racing. The rationale is quite simple. With so many competing series, event producers receive less money than needed to properly produce and promote events. Trying to give their sponsors the best return, racers bankrupt themselves going to more events than they can actually afford to attend. The media tries to remain unbiased and cover everyone. In the end, the only way to be fair is to limit the coverage as there are too many events to cover. In the end, the spectators also lose. With less money being put into the promotion of events and racers being spread thin, the quality of the events suffer. Sometimes it only takes one poorly-produced drifting event to turn off potential drifting fans for life. Spectators also became less interested because there are just too many events going on.
If you are a manufacturer that is currently benefiting from the exposure delivered through drifting, here's some advice. Spend your drifting budget on the already established event series, dedicate a portion of your drifting budget to event promotion and limit the number of events that your sponsored racers will be attending. While we hope that our advice is taken, it's likely that it won't be and that this year will mark the end of the Golden Age of drifting in the U.S. Let's hope that we are wrong.
copied from Dsport magazine
I think it'd going to depend on BIG media attention rather than what focused magazines (i.e. dsport, scc, etc) can and can't cover. Obviously TV stations aren't going to be interested in signing a contract with both Formula D and D1, but I'd say that the general success of the series has a lot to do with the integrity of the organization that is running it....and over complicating drifting with rules such as not being able to run a tire unless it's from a sponsor of that particular series.
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