NOBLESVILLE, Ind. – The big crowd filed into Kokomo Speedway, ready to witness the richest one-day short-track event in Indiana history. Eventually, nearly every seat was filled and cars parked along old U.S. 35 stretched well into the distance.
On a Monday night.
Welcome to the new world of racing promotion, where conventional wisdom has been banished to the dustbin of history. The concept of a one-day event paying a total purse of $200,000 for dirt late models being run on a Monday — successfully — proves that what we used to know (or thought we knew) we don’t know anymore.
There was a time when promoters talked of being at the mercy of the big “X-factor,” meaning the weather. Today, promoters deal with two X-factors: the weather and the audience for streaming TV.
Rain keeps paying customers away. However, if you get enough paying viewers tuning in — and provided the track gets a big enough percentage of the revenue — what used to be a marginal event is now a home run.
We can debate the relative merits of live streaming of races, but there is no debating that streaming has become a dominant factor in our sport.
It has enriched some at the expense of others, but that’s business. Some tracks and series are reeling because they’ve seen a net decrease in revenue, while others have blossomed because they’ve tapped into the rich vein of streaming money.
XR Super Series is among the latter. XR promotes dirt late model racing, which already features a crowded landscape of two major touring series, the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series and the World of Outlaws CASE Construction Equipment Late Model Series. Both series have a robust schedule that fills nearly every weekend. XR has exploited an opening by racing on off nights — in this case, Monday night at Kokomo Speedway.
The purse offered $200,000 overall and $100,000 to the winner, claimed by Hudson O’Neal. It is worth noting that the points leader of both the Lucas Oil series and the World of Outlaws series raced at Kokomo: Ricky Thornton Jr. and Chris Madden, respectively.
Barry Braun is the founder of XR Super Series, and there is much speculation on how Braun has been able to lease various venues and offer such colossal purses. Braun began his involvement in the sport with video production some 20 years ago, so it isn’t surprising that he has leveraged streaming to his advantage. Braun launched his own network, XR+. This has allowed Braun to keep the lion’s share of the streaming revenue — all of it, for all we know — and apply it to the event purse instead of receiving only a percentage from a streaming network partner.
In another corner of the sport, the High Limit Sprint Car Series has done a variation on the theme. Owned by Kyle Larson and Brad Sweet, High Limit offers midweek races that have attracted a strong roster of good racers and are streamed live on Flo. At the announcement of the series formation last year, there was no secret that streaming revenue was the key element in making the series viable.
SPEED SPORT is also a significant player in the streaming video business with its affiliates offering hundreds of races on any given weekend.
All of this is part of the rapidly evolving streaming landscape. The concept came about so quickly, and fans immediately became entrenched with their love of watching races from home, that we can easily forget that it’s all very new.
Nobody knows where this is going, of course. We might think we know, but we don’t. It will take time to fully develop.
There is only one thing we know for sure: Whatever it looks like today, it will look different one, three, five years from now.
One more point, in particular about that Kokomo crowd. There are those — I’ve been among them—who fear that people will stay home and watch rather than come to the race track. Yet, here we are on a Monday night, with a full house at an event that is being streamed.
It’s hard to make sense of today’s landscape. We need to brace ourselves: The concept, execution and ultimate business model of streaming is nowhere near settled.
We’re just getting started.
This story appeared in the June 28, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
