The Indy Car series ran its second race of the year today. And the website which includes live timing & scoring for registered users like myself was unavailable.
What happened? A server issue would be my guess. You would type in the URL, & wait & wait & wait. Sometimes you actually got on the front page, but nothing was loaded. No pictures, just spare text. Try to go on any link-nothing. So going on Indy Car Nation (the place where timing & scoring would be) was out of the question.
Now this site has been re-launched & updated. Well, that should be re-evaluated. There are only a few races, usually every other Sunday through October, so having the site down on race day is unacceptable & frankly makes the series look minor league. This is a problem when the series already suffers from low ratings compared to the ever boring southern fried crash fest that is NASCAR.
Maybe spending some real money & putting in charge someone who understands technology would be a good idea. I understand a small site crashing because it can't handle excess usage. I don't think that is the issue with a 100 year old sport with a limited following. Yes, I wish Indy Car had the following & popularity it had in the 80's, but unfortunately, today's race fan prefers the soap opera of stock car feuds to the gritty, fast pace of open wheel.
A site should never go down because the event is on. The Oscar site worked fine during the telecast. My 49er fan site with it's massive message board is almost always fine during games. Why can't a national sport have a website that works during it's event?
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