[MDBodnar]

The May issue of Motor Trend published a web poll:

What is your favorite form of Motorsport?

WRC/Rally is a very solid #2 with 22%,
NASCAR leads with only 26%.


--- I didn't see anything here (remember anything) or on the near defunct Rally-L directing votes, so this might have some real credibility

Other notes of Interest:
F1 16%, Cart 10%, Drag Racing 9%, ALMS 7%, IRL 5%, sprint car 1%.

I'll look into the details (being the consumer research geek that I am), but if this is even close to the interests of the general motorsports enthusiast it gives the US series a lot of leverage.

The SPEED Channel needs to wake up quickly (oh what a mess they have made!).

And that whole IRL/CART fiasco can be settled by returning to a series that includes rights and lefts, leaving the the roundy--rounds to NASCAR. (I wish the answers were this easy.)

Very Cool Info, I hope the new SCCA Marketing Guru and Kurt can put this to good use.

See ya in the woods,
Mike

 

[MattLovell]

the poll is still running and WRC/Rally is currently at 31.06% with Nascar at 27.29%. No, that's not a typo, the current poll has Rally above Nascar... ??? Now I am wondering about the validity of the poll. I would love for this to be the case, but I really dont see Rally beating out Nascar. I am going to cantact MT and see if they have any way of backing up their figures...

 

[jandreini]

My wife and I recently acted as scoring crew for the Dawnbuster Tour Rally. The mid-rally break was at a truck stop near Michigan International Speedway. The bars had just closed and the locals were filing in to get a bite to eat. Seeing the parking lot full of WRX's, Foci, and similar cars, one of the men asked me if there was a rally going on. I told him there was, & suddenly we were surrounded by the entire population of the restaurant. "You guys RULE!!!" "Rally is the greatest sport in the world!" "Rally drivers are the greatest drivers in the world!" All true quotes. All from ******** who saw WRC on Speed with Ralph Shaheen.

The moral here is that, while we 'purists' may not care for Ralph(personally, I like him), he and Speed have made rally visible, and the viewers like it. If Speedvision had not been purchased by NASCAR, we would still be unknown. Sometimes things work out differently than anyone would have foreseen. I look forward to improved coverage of ProRally and its attendant rise in popularity.

 

[Robb]

In another poll on the same page, titled "Will you attend a NASCAR race this year?" 44.63% said 'Nope, not interested,' While only 30.17% said 'No, but I'll watch on tv.'

Interesting.....

 

[Eric Seppanen]

It's well known that web polls are completely unreliable. They're far too easy to spoof. Until TV networks confirm that rally attracts as many viewers as nascar, I don't see any news here.

 

[JimH]

>....Now I am wondering about the validity of the poll....

I don't mean to be a downer, but these types of Web polls - along with various "Insta-polls" - are pretty much invalid by definition.

I suppose it's not that these types of polls don't mean *anything*, but with large, unpredictable biases (self-selection, mostly) and lots of possible confounders, it is pretty much impossible to figure out *what* they mean. That does not make for a valid poll.

Jim

 

[Mad Mike]

Uncle Joe (Mad Mike career navvie #9) said:

>Seeing the parking lot full of WRX's, Foci, and similar
>cars, one of the men asked me if there was a rally going on.
>I told him there was, & suddenly we were surrounded by the
>entire population of the restaurant. "You guys RULE!!!"
>"Rally is the greatest sport in the world!" "Rally drivers
>are the greatest drivers in the world!" All true quotes. All
>from ******** who saw WRC on Speed with Ralph Shaheen.

What he said!!

I have often been flabbergasted by the amazing surge in popularity rallying is experiencing here, but the pinnacle had to be the 'ricer rally car' I saw toddling past the Sand Springs, Oklahoma Git-N-Go at which I was gassing up the VANimal recently. There it was, a white, bone-stock, Korean econobox complete with hubcaps, skinny tires and, surprisingly enough, a fairly sophisticated light bar bolted on the nose that brandished four pencil-beam style driving lights!

Man, when the High School kids in backwater America are keen to make their commuters look like rally cars, can Valhalla (or Armageddon) be far behind? ;-)

M. E. "Mad Mike" Halley, RealAutoSport, LLC.
http://www.realautosport.com

 

[Mad Mike]

To view the results, try this - http://www.motortrend.com/polls/02fav_ms.html?survey

M. E. "Mad Mike" Halley, RealAutoSport, LLC.
http://www.realautosport.com

 

[slidewaysmike]

Just to stick my $0.02 in here, and maybe I have a bit of a skewed perception, but based on my stereotypical view of the majority of NASCAR fans, I would say that MT online would not really be a website that they might visit very often. Perhaps that is why NASCAR doesn't seem to be winning anymore?

If you think about it, present the same poll on Circletrack.com or winstoncup.com (I don't know if those are valid websites, just really making up the names to punctuate my point.) and I'm sure the results would be different.

Not that I'm complaining about the results of this poll, because Rally is ahead of plenty of other recognizeable motorsports that have a longer history in America then rally. So that's pretty cool.

Mike Anderson
85 VW GTI

 

[MDBodnar]

These polls don't have to meaningless.

As the web population grows it is becoming more and more representative of the general population; which has made on-line research a valid method over the last 2-3 years. (On-line research is different than this web site poll...)

In this case because you are led in by a specific web-site, the poll could be representative a specific audience. Motor Trend knows very specifically who their audience is: average income, automobile brand preferences, # of cars in household, auto sports interests, and likely cross-interests. By MT's advertising they target all things cars and little else.

I doubt they have as good of a grasp on the vitals of their web site viewers but it is a car enthusiast audience. The SPEED Channel, the current manufactures invloved in ProRally and other manufacturers interested in ProRally should recognize that conducted properly a survey of auto-enthusiasts from MT's web site could have some good information about (at a minimum) "opinion leaders" in the auto world.

All the above being said: Unfortunately this survey lets you vote more than once. It is not a legitimate representation of anything unless the data that was published (in the Mag) was cleaned by removing multiple votes.

If nothing else rallyists are a good web audience.

Mike

 

[Chad]

Ya I just checked it out, you can vote as many times as you like, its just not reliable.

 

[grinner323]

really? It only let me vote once... I even tried it with netscrape,Inferal explorer, and Opera. Are you sure it registers every time you vote?
Philip J. Boer
[email protected]

 

[Chad]

Well I voted the first time and the % was 32.02%, I went back for a second time and it the registered at 32.19%. That also tells me that the frequency of votes is still pretty low.

 

[jandreini]

To put things in perspective, it doesn't matter whether the survey has any validity or not. Two years ago, WRC would not even have been listed as a choice. The mere recognition of our sport by the likes of Motor Trend is validity in and of itself.

 

[Chris Powell]

WRC/Rally voted #1 in US!

I went there just to test a theory. I voted for WRC 10 times, and every time, it updated to the same as after I voted the first time, so it's only letting you vote once. Just to prove this theory, I voted 10 times for Sprint (I'm a closet sprint fan, but only because it's in the family), and the percentage only changed the first time I voted once again, and not after that.

CP
Desert Storm Rally
A2 Jetta #305

 

[Foghorn]

Uncle Joe,

It was 2:30ish in the morning and that crowd did appear to be somewhat alcohol aided and abetted. It was a little scary to think that those people were materializing as close to theoretical real population centers like Ann Arbor and Detroit as they were. :7 :7 :7

Kent Gardam

 

[Jerry Brownell]

Consider 2 points:
a) A very large proportion of rally enthusiasts are probably on this list and there has not been a "hey guys, everyone go vote for rally" campaign going on here, which lends at least a little bit of credibility to the numbers, and
b) Some statistician who has never heard of rally before is sitting in his poorly lit basement office saying "Holy s**t! Anyone ever heard of WRC?" That in itself is something we wouldn't have seen 10 years ago.

 

[Don Kennedy]

Yes, Yes, Yes. Very true. (Reply to post #13)

 

[Roving Rally Man]

Mike made some good observations and in my experience, the reason why NASCAR isn't getting more votes is that the wives of the ******** are hogging the puter looking for new hubbies in chatrooms so hubby can't get on the puter between cans of bud, packs of pork rinds and watching WWF on the box or the new Nascrap channel. just my observation.

By the way, does the guy that does the Nascrap commentary on Fox also do voice overs for "King of the Hill"????

Don, just wondering....