Moving on . . .

With news that the legal dispute between Tavo Hellmund and his former partners with The Circuit of the Americas has been resolved, its time to get back to everything we should be focusing upon with the return of the United States F1 Grand Prix.

Tickets have finally gone on sale, and despite the all of the nonsense associated with the Personal Seat License fiasco, they have arrived fairly consistent with the prices of Grands Prix I've attended in Europe and Montreal.    I realize many do not share this assessment, but to be honest I get the suspicion that their orientation on F1 ticket pricing is based solely upon the very unique way things were at Indianapolis.

Austin may not offer Indianapolis' expertise and infrastructure when it comes to getting everyone to and from the circuit.     Those of us who chose not to cough up the dough for a PSL will be shuttled.     Given the lack of road improvements and parking, this actually makes a lot of sense, but it must be adequately funded and properly executed.     I must wonder whether the surrounding roads will be able to handle the shuttle traffic alone, so I can only hope that they've got a solid plan in place to keep those buses moving.

That said, I'm looking forward to a great weekend in Austin.     There's plenty of positives to focus upon and that's what I intend to do from this point forward.     Looking back over the past eight months The United States Grand Prix has teetered on the brink of disaster.     The fact is that we are still here, the race is a certainty,  and Hellmund's vision, more than partially intact, is about to become reality.  

We've much to be thankful for.    The race could have remained attached to Montreal's June date thus requiring all of us to sweat it out under an oppressive Texas summer sun.    Cooler heads prevailed, and the November date comes with the added potential that the title could be decided on US soil.     (Speaking of Montreal, Sunday's Grand Prix du Canada convinced me that the world championship will be wide open when the lights go out in front of all of those PSL premium seats, but I digress . . . )
Having cleared all of these hurdles, I fully expect that the buzz surrounding the USGP in Austin will finally begin to pick up momentum.  

Growing up in Atlanta, I'd always hoped that the USGP might one day come to Road Atlanta.    I remember a good friend and Porsche race car mechanic musing that the F1 cars would shave ten seconds off the lap times set by the GT Prototypes of the era.     Ten seconds was probably fantasy, but I could only imagine what it would have been like to see Senna, Piquet, Prost attacking that wonderful undulating circuit in the mid to late 1980s!

I have no idea whether the people of Austin realize this, but my belief is that this is the beginning of something for which they'll be very proud of in years to come.