March 24, 2004

By Len Ashburn

At a recognition banquet in Terre Haute in 1996 for Sue Root and Mary Smith, for whom Sumar Racing was named, I heard Tony George give a short talk in which he spontaneously gave his views about the formation of the Indy Racing League.

At that time Tony was still pretty shy about talking in public and I don't remember too much about what he had to say. I was not there to report. But I clearly recall hearing him speak of returning championship car racing to its roots on the ovals from which it originally developed.

He said he wanted an agenda in which he (and his advisors) could control their own destiny, return the Indy cars to the ovals, and give the progeny of the ovals a chance to matriculate from that system to the top level. You may recall that at that time the ranks of the Indy car drivers had few sprint and midget graduates in their midst. Tony lamented that fact and said he wanted to see that change.

Tony said he didn't know how long it would take to gain control of his own destiny, five, ten, fifteen years, he didn't know how long. But he was committed to achieve it. He said he knew the cost would be high but it was something that had to be done. He did not elaborate as to why that was but those present all knew full well that championship car racing in that time period was controlled by CART and Tony could see the day when he would have to make major accomodation to CART leaders in order to have a field for the Indy 500.

The handwriting had been on the wall for a number of years as the number of 'teams' contesting championship cars shrank to less than thirty. Gone were the glory days of ninety or more entries for the Indy 500.

The culprit was cost and Tony's staff put together a new league with a formula that would allow an entry to be developed for one third the cost of the CART driven editon.

The IRL is about ten years old now and recent news in the legal pages report that CART was in bankruptcy and it's assets would be sold at auction. There were two bidders, a consortium of former CART car owners, and Tony George who submitted a bid TEN MILLION dollars higher than the other.

But the judge was not looking at dollars as the currency for the transaction. The judge took an attitude that rehabilitation was the goal and gave the nod to the car owners who had a plan to inject new life into CART. He let the car owners take the assets for three and a half million dollars and, in so doing, allowed the bleeding of championship car racing to continue for the nonce.

Two and a half months have passed since the judge's decision and in that time two major teams have left the former CART camp, now known as Open Wheel Racing Series (OWRS) but marketing as the Champ Car World Series. The departing teams are true businesses and part of their revenue stream, a big part, depends on sponsorship dollars. Those sponsors see a brighter picture in the business model of the IRL and the Indy 500 than the prospect of an increasingly dubious Long Beach street race struggling to assemble eighteen cars with only fifteen counted and less than a month to go.

So Tony George appears to be controlling his own destiny and returning Indy cars to the ovals, that's one goal achieved. The others, cost containment and giving short track graduates a chance at the big time, have failed. The oval track open wheel drivers with great talent have all slipped on south to the 'Cup' cars of NASCAR. It is not uncommon to see five of them in the top ten at any 'Cup', BGN, or CTS stock car race. These ex-open wheel boys are the talented ones. Meanwhile the ranks of the IRL are sprinkled increasingly liberally with seeded foreign drivers who bring money to the table, for IRL cars now cost nearly as much as the cars the league was created to contain.

The final chapter is not yet written. We haven't mentioned a lot of the intimate details of this story, not the least of which was speed creep and chassis' in flight which saw the cubic displacement dropped half a litre and caused new engines to be developed. This created an engine shortage for the Indy 500 which threatened a 33 car field but this fear seems somewhat subsided on this 23rd day of March.

So stay tuned. Read the news stories here on Insiders and prodigys@Speed, for here you will find more facts than opinions, and take columns you read elsewhere as opinions and less as facts.

And that's the way I see Open Wheel racing as the trees begin to bud here on Lake Luett in Indy.

You can contact Len at: Speed News Now