Formula One's near-constant flirtation with the United States throughout the last few decades has been one of the least-successful periods of sustained wooing in history. Time and again the sport knocks on the US's door, hair slicked back, flowers in hand, only to be met with indifference, cold shoulders and an awful lot of disappointment.
Not that there isn't an audience for F1 in America, as anyone with even the most casual acquaintance with various Formula One online messageboards will tell you, the world's skintest superpower is packed with knowledgeable and excitable F1 fans. But either through shooting itself in the foot, or through simple matters of circumstance, F1 has never really settled back in America since the good old days of Watkins Glen.
Now, the sport will attempt something of a pincer movement in order to finally seal some sort of wedded bliss between themselves and American motorsport fans. From 2013 we will have two US events on the F1 schedule, both offering something suitably different to justify the greedy assignment of two races to a single country in an era of unprecedented gridlock on the schedule.
From the west (well, the mid-west), F1 plans to offer a state-of-the-art venue, thrilling racing and super-fast speeds at the new Texan Tilkedrome, while from the east, the sport will ramp up its glamorous, rich and evocative side, with a street track dawdle around the less-glamorous side of the Hudson River in New Jersey.
It's a bold, and possibly optimistic move, but one that could possibly pay off. Doubling the number of F1 races available to American fans increases the catchment area for the sport in a country that is as wide as the waistlines of some of its inhabitants. An F1 fan stuck up in Maine who might baulk at the prospect of a day-long flight either way to the Circuit of the Americas can now pop down to New Jersey in a couple of hours to watch the action.
And the track plans for the New Jersey event are also promising. The initial designs for the track appear to show a circuit layout that has had a modicum of thought put into it, rather than just a lazily scrawled line around a city centre. Even comments from West New York attorney Joe DeMarco, who said of the track: "They compare it to Spa in Belgium but it will have the feel of Monaco" actually seems to make sense. It looks fast, but reassuringly street-based.
But, despite all the positivity, this is far from the first attempt Formula One has made at claiming America's streets as their own. After Watkins Glen vanished from the calendar in 1980, the sport moved to a staggeringly-awful temporary street course in Las Vegas, literally assembled in the car park of the Caesars Palace casino. The track, which looked like a mutant hand hosted two unloved races in 1981 and 1982, before F1 sodded off and Indycar slightly bizarrely attempted to convert the thing into an oval.
Detroit then took up the reins from 1982 to 1988, but again there was never any great love for the event from drivers or spectators. The track layout was overly tight and twisty, and in a country where motor racing is synonymous with pure speed, the sight of F1 cars dawdling around downtown Detroit at an average speed of 80mph did not stir America's soul.
Even more catastrophic was the one-off race at Dallas in 1984, which was the first and only F1/soap opera crossover (until such point as Home and Away gets Daniel Ricciardo in for a cameo). Larry Hagman waved the green flag to start the race and Dallas stars posed next to the glamorous likes of Huub Rothengatter and Thierry Boutsen, but the attempt at glitz couldn't help the race itself. The GP was bedevilled by track surface issues, and although the race did go the distance, F1 never returned, preferring instead, in true Dallas fashion, to pretend the whole thing was a bad dream.
One final effort was made to get an F1 street race working in the US, and the racing moved to Phoenix for three races from 1989 to 1991. Fan-wise, this proved to be the worst of the lot, and barely 18,000 spectators turned out for the denouement to Formula One's American street adventure in 1991, apocryphally a smaller crowd than a local ostrich race managed on the same day. Though to be fair, they appear to be awesome.
Since then, there was the uncomfortable eight-year stint at the anaemic Indianapolis Motor Speedway's road course, featuring the unhappy sights of Ferrari pissing about in 2002 and Michelin pissing off in 2005. But that track always felt like an effort to try and shoehorn F1 into an existing bit of the American establishment, like trying to squeeze a side salad into a hollowed-out Thanksgiving turkey, or some sense into Glenn Beck. And F1 will probably never go back.
Instead, New Jersey needs to be able to break this cycle of disinterested shrugging in the face of US street races, and in US GPs in general, and time will only tell whether or not they will succeed. But with the twin lure of Austin and New Jersey pushing forward F1's latest foray to America, Formula One is throwing the kitchen sink, plumbing and all, at their efforts to finally crack America.
After so many half-hearted efforts, F1 is doing what it does best. A brand-new Tilkedrome and a glamour-based street race. And if America doesn't fall for either of them, then maybe motorsport's longest courtship is finally over.
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