It was perfectly imperfect timing on Friday night when the dreaded “Friday night news dump 101" tsunami hit and the race that many thought never really had a chance, the inaugural Grand Prix of Boston, got wiped from the 2016 Verizon IndyCar Series schedule.
With the cancellation the first step in the process, the last few days have seen the fun part: the fallout, finger-pointing and frustration that comes afterwards.
A column from the Boston Globe, which had supported the race more than not, had the headline of “Boston, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.”
The column adds the IndyCar false start to other failed attempts at sporting events, including a rejected New England Patriots stadium bid and the withdrawn 2024 Olympics bid.
Columnist Mike Ross wrote, “The pattern is now familiar: An idea gets floated. A group forms against the idea. A website is created, in this case www.noindycarboston.org. And the idea dies.”
Boston Mayor Marty J. Walsh (pictured above) held a press conference, as well. “There’s a lot of unanswered questions on INDYCAR to us,” he said as part of it, but he also said Boston had the infrastructure in place to pull the event off, contrary to the withdrawn Olympics bid. The full quick video of that is linked here.
Event organizers have announced refunds for those who have already bought tickets. A post was released on the event’s social media pages on Saturday (see below for that), and an example of an email sent to fans is below that (thanks to @RickWeber for bringing this to my attention)
@tonydizinno @MotorSportsTalk @curtcavin @marshallpruett @IndyOreo u might be interested in email tixbuyers rec'd pic.twitter.com/erkR8euYUv
— Rick Weber (@rickweber) April 30, 2016
Event spokeswoman Jana Watt told the Globe about the refund process, “The ticket refunds will be processed in the order received, and it is a manual process and could take some time to complete as each individual order must be processed.” A number of fan comments were included within that post.
What replacement options for Boston could work? We’ll have that in a separate post later today.