New Jersey promoter confident for 2014

09/03/2013

While doubts remain over funding, New Jersey Grand Prix promoter, Leo Hindery Jr. is confident that other obstacles which prevented the race going ahead this year will be overcome.

Indeed, Hindery insists that it was the failure to get local and federal approvals for the event that stood in the way of the bid to raise the necessary funding.

Now, on the eve of the 2013 season, Hindery is confident that all issues will be resolved and the race will go ahead next year.

"We are back under construction," he told Sports Business Daily. "We have the consents in place that we didn't have last fall, and we will quite comfortably put the race on, now probably in the mid-year of 2014 with (Bernie Ecclestone's) support.

"There are two civil engineering pieces that still need attention," he admitted. "One is the obvious one in that the course itself has to be paved to take out any crowns in the roadway, make it perfectly flat, and then Charlie Whiting and his associates demand a quality of asphalt paving that's very, very high end."

While the paving will get underway in September, the other major issue is transportation and seating alongside the Hudson River, which runs along one side of the track and forms the backdrop to this much anticipated event. No problem, insists Hindery.

"We are going to put some, like a pontoon, floats where some of the ferries that will serve the race will dock," he said. "We have about 39 ferries that will be part of the transportation scheme. And we will do some work over the summer to make the landing area for the ferries a little larger and that will include some stands right on the river's edge.

"We were on track, I thought, pretty well for June 2013," he added, "and, to be frank, we couldn't get all of the approvals necessary, most especially right around the river itself. Here in the U.S., water ways are the responsibility of multiple jurisdictions. We have now all of those consents."

While Ecclestone still believes that money was the key stumbling block, other than the local and federal approvals, Hindery claims that Hurricane Sandy also added to the problems facing the 2013 event. Indeed, he believes Ecclestone ultimately made the correct call by removing the race from the schedule.

"I think that Bernie made absolutely the right decision," he concluded.