People complained and Honda Indy Toronto listened

Mar 26, 2010

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Motorsport Writer

The checkered flag had barely stopped fluttering following the 2009 Honda Indy Toronto when Charlie Johnstone got his first email letter of complaint.

Not that there hadn’t been a lot of grousing during the race weekend itself. For me, it had started about 9 a.m. on the Friday morning when I got off an eastbound GO Train with about 500 other people and found that the entrance to the CNE grounds beside the Ricoh Centre wasn’t open.

And then when we – me and the 500 other people – walked around to the east end of the Direct Energy Centre, we found the place to be just about wide open. There was no “gate,” per se, just a couple of security guards fighting a losing battle by trying to check tickets and credentials of those 500 people (plus a whole bunch of others) who – by that time – were in no mood to talk nicely to anybody.

Not a particularly good start to a weekend that marked the return of Indy-style car racing to the streets of Toronto after a year’s absence.

Anyway, Johnstone — vice-president and general manager of the race — wasn’t terribly surprised when the phone calls, emails and letters started to arrive. But instead of letting them pile up unopened or unreturned, he set out to either telephone or write back to everybody who’d contacted him.

Every one of them — and he copied me on a lot of them because many of those folks had cc’d me their letters of complaint.

“People were really surprised when I said who was on the line,” Johnstone said during an interview earlier this week. “ ‘Oh, you return your phone calls?’ was the general tone.

“But I felt it really important to touch base with as many people as I could over the winter,” he continued. “We made some fundamental policy changes before last year’s race that drew the ire of many people, particularly people who’d attended the race for many years. And we made those changes too late and we couldn’t communicate them to people in time.

“The bottom line is that we made mistakes last year and we’ve been working extremely hard ever since to rectify as many as we can.”

Johnstone said the biggest misunderstanding was over food and drink.

“We acknowledge that there was some heavy-handedness,” he said, in reference to one complaint that a security guard had confiscated a small bottle of apple juice from a child in a stroller.

“So this is what we have done for this year. First, we will carefully instruct our ticket takers and pass control and security people to show some discretion. We won’t be seizing liquids from babies in strollers.

“However, as is consistent with every other street course racetrack in North America, and most arenas, ball parks and amusement parks like Canada’s Wonderland, we will still not allow outside food or drink to be taken into the CNE grounds.

“And we have advertised this on our website since we put our tickets up for sale last November. Hopefully, through alerts on the website and through articles such as yours, there won’t be any misunderstandings this year.

“Having said all that, we have to make sure that there is a varied menu available to people once they pass through the gates. We do not expect our customers to buy a ticket and then find out that all that’s available on the grounds is pizza.

“So we have taken all food services in-house this year and we will be providing a variety of foodstuffs for sale — a wide range of choice — that we hope will satisfy and even delight people over the three days of the race.”

A major complaint leading up to the 2009 event was a lack of promotion and Johnstone acknowledges there were problems in that area that could have contributed to a much lower attendance than had been expected.

“This year, we plan to use the Indianapolis 500 at the end of May as the jumping-off point for what we expect will be seven solid weeks of promotion,” Johnstone said.

“We have contracted with a new ad agency, we will be announcing new media partners in the near future and we have clauses in the contracts of all our sponsors that they will promote the race in their advertising and at their places of business.

“We plan to promote the 2010 Honda Indy Toronto online, in stores and on TV. People who complained about our promotion last year were right, in some ways, and we’ve taken action to correct that.

“The Indy 500 is going to be our ‘bump.’ Most of the cars and stars of that famous race will be coming to do battle on the streets of Toronto so Indy is the perfect jumping-off point for us, so far as promotion is concerned.

“But that doesn’t mean we won’t be doing some promoting in the meantime. I want you to take note of what we’ve got planned for the St. Petersburg race this Sunday (tomorrow, TSN2, 3:30 p.m.). I can’t tell you what it is, but I guarantee the reaction will be, ‘I can’t believe what I just saw!’ ”

Johnstone was also quick to point out the vast improvement in the support race program scheduled this July over the less-than-stellar undercard in ’09.

“One of the first things we did after last year’s event was sit down and figure out what we needed to do to make the on-site racing fans happier when the IndyCars weren’t out there practising, qualifying and racing.

“So this year, in addition to the Firestone Indy Lights Series that did put on a terrific show last year, we’ve added the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series stock cars — and we’re really excited about having them because they always have a good race — the SCCA Trans-Am Series, two SCCA World Challenge Series races and the Castrol Canadian Touring Car Series.

“I can honestly say that I can’t think of a racing event weekend like the Honda Indy that has as power-packed a lineup of races as we will have at the CNE July 16-18. And because they all have TV contracts, the on-site fan will be able to watch all of the races on the big-screen TVs, which will be an improvement over last year when the series we had didn’t have TV partners so there was no big-screen presentation.”

Johnstone also thinks the Izod IndyCar Series has turned the corner.

“I think the old Champ Car vs. the IRL argument is dead and buried,” he said. “All the best drivers are in IndyCar, the car count is up to 24 or more for every race and the racing is the best you’ll find anywhere — as we all witnessed at Brazil two weeks ago.

“For Toronto, Paul Tracy will be back and you know he always tries his absolute best, particularly in front of his hometown fans. He’ll be duking it out with Helio Castroneves (they crashed together last year), Dario Franchitti, fellow Canadian Alex Tagliani and the rest of them.

“And we’ll have a wonderful lineup of women drivers with Danica Patrick and Simona De Silvestro leading the way. With luck, Ana Beatriz could also be here.”

Okay, Charlie. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

nmcdonald@thestar.ca

Norris McDonald writes an Auto Racing blog at Wheels.ca.