It is sad to see CART at Chicago Motor Speedway this weekend, so ghastly pale from the hemorrhaging of the six-year Indy car civil war and wobbling, perhaps, toward its deathbed.
No motor racing organization in the world has done more things right–nor more things wrong–than CART in its 22 years of existence.
On balance it has come to this: If CART dies-and with it what is left of an American institution long known as Indy-car racing-the mourners will be relatively few. The public just doesn’t care much anymore.
CART has made its cars safer, at higher speeds, than any others in racing. It has the finest traveling medical unit for treating injured drivers in the world.
CART, with high technology, has induced kaleidoscopic passing on the track . . . all of this virtually unnoticed by the one crucial element CART forgot to embrace along the way: the American public.
The tidal wave of NASCAR threatens to make the U.S. a one-motorsport country. CART’s barons have awakened to this too late and are flailing to keep the deluge from sweeping them away.
CART is virtually begging for a TV contract for next year, straining to hold onto nervous corporate sponsors and groping for gimmicks to draw spectators. The trouble is that even now, the team owners who rule CART don’t know what they want.
They’re hoping for a decent walk-up crowd to help fill the grandstands for Sunday’s Target Grand Prix. They struggle to make their Chicago race “a happening,” as they categorize their handful of remaining successful events, such as those at Long Beach, Calif., and Toronto.
But CART doesn’t need another champagne picnic where the whine of turbo-charged engines is but background noise–garish chamber music for a social gathering.
CART needs, simply, to have its races watched. That is, focused on by spectators and understood. That is not happening. All that intense following has gone to NASCAR.
A prime example was CART’s 500-miler last Sunday at Michigan International Speedway. There were an astounding 167 actual lead changes on the track, 60 of them official at the start-finish line. Those are numbers for even passing-crazy NASCAR to envy.
And in the same live TV time slot, the NASCAR race at New Hampshire International Speedway produced only two passes on the track for the lead.
Yet at Michigan, only a smattering of spectators sat in the grandstands, and ABC’s live telecast drew only a 1.9 overnight rating. In New Hampshire the grandstands were packed to capacity and the NASCAR race drew a 5.2 cable rating.
The CART racing was far better than the NASCAR racing. But the public was oblivious to this.
“You can have all sorts of excitement, but if the room is dark, no one sees,” said Kenny Brack, the driver who leads CART’s point standings.
CART’s drivers, mostly unknowns from abroad (Brack is Swedish) are meek, their eyes vaguely pleading for publicity during interviews. At this they have become a lot like their counterparts in the rival Indy Racing League, which started the ruinous schism in Indy-car racing and remains itself a struggling upstart organization without a solid fan base.
CART, with its heavy emphasis on road racing rather than ovals, has become a de facto AAA farm system for the world’s richest and most glamorous form of open-wheel racing, Formula One.
For example, Juan Montoya was farmed out by the Williams F1 team to Ganassi Racing for training, won two CART championships and was recalled to Williams.
The IRL, obsessed with oval tracks, is a similar farm system for NASCAR–no sooner had Tony Stewart established himself as the IRL’s star than he was wooed away to Winston Cup. So the drivers in the separate forms of Indy-car racing are either youngsters being groomed for, or washouts from, the two more popular leagues.
Thus the dearth of household names, Michael Andretti of CART is the only one left. To win, especially on road courses, CART owners have felt compelled to hire European and Latin American drivers with better training than Americans. But that has left CART with names the American public has not chosen to embrace.
And, many race fans claim, even if you cared who was passing whom in Indy-car races, you couldn’t tell. Unlike the big, distinctively painted, easily visible NASCAR stock cars, the tiny Indy cars are simply difficult to follow on the track.
CART, since its inception in 1978–for the very purpose of improving the public appeal of Indy-car racing–has drifted toward higher and higher technology. That was a digression from the American philosophy of racing, which emphasizes the show and the individuals, toward European tradition, where the cars are the stars.
While CART and the IRL have squabbled over technology, NASCAR has gone with crude cars on the philosophy that “All our fans want to see in a race car is a hero inside,” as H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, president of Lowe’s Motor Speedway near Charlotte, puts it.
When CART broke away from Indy in 1996, in an ego conflict with Speedway President Tony George, savvy observers saw immediately the mutually assured destruction of the warring parties. CART and the IRL took a dwindling audience, split it in half, confused it, polarized it and finally disgusted it, leaving the spoils to NASCAR.
Still the two sides diverged ever more stubbornly, until the Indy 500 was gutted of its world renown and CART became a series adrift. Both hemorrhaged popularity year after year until, in 2000, some CART teams began to drift back to Indy, buying and tuning IRL-legal cars for the one annual event.
But the tenuous reunion only re-emphasized the frailty of Indy and its makeshift IRL. CART teams proved vastly superior even with IRL cars. Chip Ganassi won Indy easily with Montoya in 2000; Roger Penske’s drivers, Helio Castroneves and Gil de Ferran, finished one-two in 2001 to lead a CART-team sweep of the first six places.
It was all too late. The Indy 500 and Indy-car racing in general were far down the slippery slope toward obscurity in the public mind.
Now CART comes to Chicago groping for miracles, for another “happening,” some sort of home, some way of replacing the cornerstone it left at Indy.
At best it will survive a while longer.
Grand Prix of Chicago
Where: Chicago Motor Speedway, Cicero.
When: 3 p.m., Sunday
Defending champion: Cristiano da Matta.
TV: WLS-Ch. 7
Tickets: Call 773-242-2277 or
708-652-2812. Sunday prices range from $35-$110.
Schedule
Sunday
12 p.m.: Atlantic race
3 p.m.: Target Grand Prix
