Last spring, Gene Hallman couldn’t fathom still having to worry about things like a pandemic, a vaccine or IndyCarschedule changes once the calendar rolled into the New Year.
In September, the president and CEO of Bruno Event Team that operates the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama at Barber Motorsports Park, thought circ*mstances around COVID-19 across the country were improving – even while vaccines were still mere pipe dreams.
Now, more than three weeks into the country’s vaccine rollout, fresh off the news that his team will host IndyCar’s 2021 season-opener for the first time, Hallman admits one of the few certainties, beyond the race’s date is this: they’ll be forced to operate as if the vaccine doesn’t exist.
Though almost jarring to hear as states begin to formalize vaccination plans for the general population, it’s a reality that promoters hosting some of the first large-scale events of the new year will be facing. At a time where he hopes infection, hospitalization and death rates will be dipping while vaccine momentum picks up speed, Hallman and his team will be left tapping the breaks, instead of stepping on the gas.
“We’re making our plan, basically, with the assumption that people that haven’t been vaccinated are those planning on coming to our event,” Hallman told IndyStar Wednesday. “And we really have to make this spring event work.
“So sitting here now, it’s pretty clear our (ticket) supply is not going to be able to support the demand.”
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Beyond that, certainties are few and far between for IndyCar’s early-season race promoters, who have been blessed with the bittersweet notion of helping kickoff a season that may end in relative normalcy but will open in anything but.
Wednesday was the second schedule change in less than three weeks, as what’s been the traditional opener in St. Pete shifts back seven weeks from March 7 to April 25, ceding the celebration to Barber on April 11. Outside of last year, it will be the first time since the 2009 at St. Pete that the series opened outside of March.
When the original schedule was released in October, fans stared at it longingly, curious why such a momentous event like the St. Pete opener would be followed by four vacant weekends. Even then, it would have been hard to imagine the pandemic not affecting spring race weekends in some way, so it begged the question: Why was IndyCar setting itself up for more changes.
Such thoughts around St. Pete weren’t considered last fall, said Kevin Savoree, co-owner of Green Savoree Racing Promotions, which operates IndyCar races at St. Pete, Toronto, Mid-Ohio and Portland. In fact, GSRP had been initially contracted with the St. Pete officials to hold a race March 14, language drawn up in the partners’ previous extension. But an opportunity to run on network television, rather than cable, enticed a move up a week, even if it left IndyCar hosting its first three events spread out over seven weekends.
Had the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach not wished to make a drastic shift from its traditional April slot all the way to this year’s season-finale Sept. 26 in a December announcement, the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg may still have sat precariously in the first week of March, with a need to begin a track build three weeks away and an ability to host a significant number of fans in jeopardy.
“Seven weeks is an eternity in what we’re dealing with,” Savoree told IndyStar Thursday. “Obviously, the state, Pinellas County and St. Pete, they’re having their surge right now, so this allowed us to push back our track build so we’ll hopefully start to see numbers come back down and have more vaccine in the area by then.”
When St. Pete hosted the 2020 season-finale Oct. 25, Florida’s seven-day averages in new reported COVID-19 cases (3,374) and deaths (66) were near the end of what appeared to be a late-summer/early-fall dip, while the state’s 14-day average positivity rate hovered below 5%.
Presently, Florida has averaged more than 100 deaths daily the past seven days with a new daily case count average nearing 15,000. The 14-day rolling positivity rate? It’s more than than doubled since late-October, at 11.5% and climbing. Though on a smaller scale, Alabama’s metrics have shown a similar climb.
It comes at a time where federal health officials estimate January will likely become the country’s hardest-hit month to date on the heels of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s travel.
For event promoters like Hallman and Savoree, it’s left them in an awkward limbo, unable to do much planning and instead, left to consider several scenarios that will have to be quickly enacted last-minute. Neither has begun selling tickets.
Savoree said his team plans to wait till Jan. 22 and use pandemic metrics on that date as a baseline for planning for crowd capacity. Last year, they announced less than four weeks out from race day that they’d be allowed to host 20,000 fans. Theoretically, numbers would need to dip down relatively soon just to be able to hit that mark
“I think we’re most likely going to be facing fan limitations for most of the events we deal with on the GSRP side,” Savoree said.
Hallman said his team doesn’t presently have a target date to set fan attendance limits, though they’ll need more than a month’s lead time from their April 11 race date to properly market and push ticket sales, as well as give sponsors and teams a chance to plan their hospitality set-ups.
What they do know is this: Fans that attend Barber this year will likely notice a lack of grandstands, tents and even the venue’s classic on-site ferris wheel. It’ll all be in the spirit of promoting the social distancing guidelines Hallman believes will still be necessary, even with more and more Americans receiving the vaccine.
And it makes sense. As of Wednesday, 5.3 million doses of the vaccine (which requires two doses per person to be complete) had been administered, as the country presently averages about 500,000 doses per day. Even if you account for President-elect Joe Biden’s goal of 100 million vaccinations doses distributed in his first 100 days in office (ending April 30), it stands to reason that just under (for Barber) or over (St. Pete) 50 million Americans will have completed the COVID-19 vaccine program in mid-to-end of April, just over 15% of the population – nowhere near the number necessary for the vaccine rollout to play a part in an increased ability for fans to attend races.
For now, organizers anxiously await the start of IndyCar’s 2021 season but unable to envision what that may look like. For better or worse, both agreed that whatever the circ*mstances, fans shouldn’t expect any other early-season schedule changes, even if capacity projections land far from an ideal level.
“This will be our biggest challenge, far and away,” Hallman said of April’s race. “It’s all lacking any clarity about what we’ll be able to do, how many people we can have and how many of them can be in hospitality. And these numbers, it makes it hard for any public health officials to give you what you’re looking for. There’s no magic formula.
“I thought last year was going to be the year of uncertainty and unknowns, but that seems to be case this year, too. About the only thing I can say with a high degree of certainty is we’re going to have a race.”
Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.
