Declining television viewership is a problem that not only affects auto racing but sports in general. Depending on the poles you look at and the surveys that are taken, even the NFL and the National Hockey League are suffering in terms of ratings. I think the key is can we all agree and come together and come up with some sort of concrete plan to improve those ratings and the exposure. The easiest thing to measure in regards to television is how many people are watching the show. Obviously another yardstick is the number of spectators at the events and the benefit you may get sponsoring the brand awareness and so forth .
Television is very important, there's no questions about that.
But beyond that it is very difficult to measure the value of exposure. I would say that Honda uses its internal resources to gauge the value or the quality of the broadcast, not just inside corporate Honda but inside the dealerships too. We host groups of dealers at basically every event which gives us an opportunity to interface with them, to hear, ask them what they are getting out of it, what they see the value of CART racing as it gives us feedback from a captive audience. There are over a hundred racing programs on TV every single week apart from the actual race broadcast when the cars are on the track. When you look at the coverage that we get from those programs, the internet, magazines, the papers etc., I think you will find that it is about equal to every other racing series there.