2015 MAVTV 500
The 2015 MAVTV 500 IndyCar race was a open-wheel motorsport event held on June 27, 2015 at the 2.000-mile (3.219 km) oval course at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California. It marked the 11th round of the 2015 season and unlike the previous season, is not the championship's final race of the season.
The race featured an IndyCar Series record 80 lead changes. The race was the first race since the 2011 IZOD IndyCar World Championship to feature pack-style racing. While many observers applauded the race as being one of the most exciting races in recent IndyCar history (Jan Wagner of the Del Mar Times called it "one of the best IndyCar races ever"), others questioned the racing as being too dangerous. The race ended with a spectacular airborne crash from Ryan Briscoe, who was uninjured.
Report
Qualifying
Initial practice and qualifying took place in the afternoon on Friday June 27, 2015 with a final practice occurring later that evening.
Race results
Championship standings after the race
MAVTV
MAVTV (originally known as Maverick Television) is an American cable and satellite television channel owned by the automotive lubricant company Lucas Oil, a ubiquitous presence in the motorsports world, which mainly airs programming focused around motorsports and programming for automotive enthusiasts. Bob Patison serves as the network's president.
History
MAVTV launched on October 1, 2004 based out of Atlanta with distribution limited to select cable companies, with the name a shortening of Maverick Television (the network's name at launch). The network was privately held and founded by four former executives from Showtime Networks—Steve Severn, Steve Smith, Doug Jost, Rob Stevens.
Purchase by Lucas Oil and change of programming direction
In October 2011, longtime partner lubricants company Lucas Oil purchased Maverick Television; the company had provided and sponsored most of the network's motorsports rights even before their purchase, and the network was likely to go dark without the purchase as programming rights had deteriorated towards barter programming and heavy repeats of library content. The network was quickly reformatted away by the new management from a completely male focus featuring lowbrow comedies, low-tier male targeting programming and Canadian content dramas with low cost purchase rights, and late night shows featuring women in bikini shoots towards a general family programming direction.
MAVTV 500
The MAVTV 500 is an IndyCar Series race held at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California. The event represents a continuous lineage of open wheel oval racing in the Southern California-area that dates back to 1970. Since 2012, the event has been sponsored by MAVTV, a motorsports cable channel owned by Lucas Oil.
For many years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the race served as the season finale for the CART series. From 2012-2014, it served as the finale for the IndyCar Series.
History
USAC
Open wheel oval racing in southern California dates back to the USAC California 500 at Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, held from 1970–1980. The race was part of Indy car racing's "triple crown", and at its inception, was held in high prestige. The inaugural running was considered a huge success, with 187,000 in attendance. However, the track fell into financial troubles, and closed in 1980. Subsequent runnings were never able to match the success of the 1970 event.
Indy car races were also held at nearby Riverside, but only from 1967–1969 (prior to the opening of Ontario) and again from 1981–1983 (after Ontario closed).
Podcasts:
