Full Throttle

Both the Champ Car and the IndyCar Series have launched bids to hold a street race in San Antonio Texas.

A local company says it’s just days away from putting the wheels in motion to bring Indy car racing to San Antonio. But another racing league says it wants to put the pedal to the metal here, too.

The Indy Racing League, or IRL, continues working on its proposal to bring the Grand Prix to San Antonio. However, a company called Champ Car is close to bringing a deal to local developer, HollyHills, who will pick up the tab for most of the race-related expenses.

The president of Champ Car toured the proposed race layout around the Alamodome with City Councilman Kevin Wolff on Friday. Both Champ Car and IRL hold auto races on street tracks and bring out more than a million spectators every year.

Whichever deal HollyHills chooses, there would still be a cost to the city. Taxpayer dollars would pay for security, clean up, and even repairing the streets used for a race. That’s why Wolff wants the details of the agreement laid out soon. He says city staffers need to get busy determining if San Antonio can make this work and still turn a profit.

HollyHills says television advertising is a big selling point. Whichever racing league offers more free TV spots for San Antonio during its races in other cities may clinch the deal.

It’s not clear who will win this “food fight” or when any event would be held. My gut feeling, considering the repaving requirement and molasses-like movement of governmental bureaucracy, 2007 would be a fair target date. By then the two sanctioning bodies may merge into only one, if rumors turn out to be true.

I would also question the “free TV spots” request by HollyHills. That seems to be a “blood from a turnip” proposition to me, but I have been wrong before. A search of HollyHills turns up projects from a golf course, to resorts and time-share projects. That indicates they may have the financial where-with-all to pull it off.

Time will tell.

One last note: Would you call this a “food fight” or a Danica vs Katherine Legge racing diva fight?

Champ Car, IndyCar, San Antonio, Auto Racing, Motorsports, Full Throttle