That’s probably part of it. However, having a successful player of local origin is not a hard prerequisite for following sports. Look at how many Manchester United fans there are in India or Asia. The last time I checked, there is no Indian Manchester United player.
Tony Kanaan just won the Indy 500, is that going to make Indycar more popular in Brazil than F1?
Anyway, as an interesting experiment, imagine that Indycar and F1 merged and each team could build cars based on either set of rules. Would the F1 people still beat the Indycar people?
Probably. There’s a lot more money in F1 than there is in Indy racing. Indy racing is dying a slow death.
blah blah blah.
has anyone been watching F1 laterly? Bar a few races it’s boring now because there’s barely any racing. apart from the start and finsh and a few laps in between it’s a lull.
the incident b/w vettel and webber is a great example. im glad vettel told them to fk off even though he’s a prick.
nascar is infinitely more enjoyable to watch even though the tech,strategy is nowhere near F1.
Maybe there’s a middleground, or cultural differences are part of it. I know India is much crazier about cricket, for instance, while most brazilians don’t even know what cricket is ( I actually Googled it 30 seconds ago for the first time).
One example here that goes against my previous examples is the NBA. NBA was always more popular than local bastketball here, and it was more popular in the ´90s. There were no brazilians in the NBA then, but then again there was Jordan, Magic and all those Dream Team guys.
On Tony Kanaan, Brazil actually had many Indy winners, or good performers, but it didn’t catch on that much. It got a little boost by having a race in Sao Paulo for couple years now. F1 is still more popular, but the gap is probably smaller.
On a merger, I think the F1 pilots would win by far. That’s based on just the two examples I mentioned above. Nigel Mansell was among the best F1 racers and he won Indy on his first year. Michael Andretti was among the top Indy Racers, but couldn’t perform as well on F1.
Of course, it’s not that clear because those are just two random examples.
Andretti has (bad) excuses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Andretti#Formula_One
Mansell seems days-of-thunder crazy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Mansell#CART_IndyCar_World_Series
That 20 years ago, and F1 gets more boring each year, so it’s possible that some top pilots would actually choose Indy now.