Troubled CART opens its season Sunday at Monterrey, Mexico, and won’t run in the United States until April 14 in what has become its showcase event, the Long Beach Grand Prix. New CART CEO Chris Pook, also the founding promoter of the Long Beach event, still is maneuvering to solidify CART’s schedule as the season unfolds.
CART announced this week that it will join the American Le Mans sports car series in a doubleheader “Grand Prix of the Americas” Oct. 4-6 on a new circuit through the streets of Miami–this on the heels of CART’s salvaging of its races in Chicago (June 30) and Cleveland (July 14) by getting into the race-promotion business itself.
Funding individual race promotions, plus paying for air time on CBS, amounts to a gamble this year that could make or break what once was the best, most popular open-wheel series in the United States–and a decade ago was gaining on Formula One in international popularity.
The archrival Indy Racing League scored a highly symbolic opening Saturday at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Its reigning champion, Sam Hornish Jr., won the race over the much-heralded defecting team from CART, Team Penske, with drivers Helio Castroneves and Gil de Ferran. Plus, the IRL has a much stronger TV package than CART this year.
Pook is a master promoter, but reversing CART’s erosion–Roger Penske is gone and Chip Ganassi is believed to be headed for the IRL in 2003–will be a monumental task.
What’s going on? With three straight Sundays of controversial judgment calls by officials in Winston Cup races–To red-flag or not to red-flag? Will or won’t the official on the ground hear the tower command for a penalty for speeding on the pit road?–NASCAR goes for four in a row this weekend at the most fitting of venues.
Atlanta Motor Speedway in 1978 was the site of the most notorious scoring goof in modern NASCAR history. At first, it appeared Richard Petty had beaten Dave Marcis by a nose. But then Donnie Allison drove into Victory Lane, claiming he actually had won but hadn’t been scored properly.
NASCAR officials at first awarded the victory to Allison. Hours later they reversed themselves and proclaimed Petty the winner. More hours later, they gave it to Allison again.
What went wrong? It took a youthfully candid 15-year-old named Brian France–now a senior vice president of NASCAR–the son of NASCAR czar Bill France Jr., to spill the beans about the mistake. NASCAR races were scored by hand in those days. Young France saw, in mid-race, that the woman who had been assigned to score Allison was a Petty fan. She was watching Petty make a pass in Turn 2 of the track and missed seeing Allison’s car come past the start-finish line in the pits and therefore shorted Allison one lap.
In the pits: Todd Bodine, who started on the pole at Las Vegas last week but predicted he wouldn’t make it to Atlanta because of lack of sponsorship, was right. Unable to find sufficient backing since financially troubled Kmart pulled out, Haas-Carter Motorsports has decided to send only Bodine’s teammate, Joe Nemechek, and his crew to Sunday’s MBNA America 500. . . . No matter how Bobby Labonte has been running at other tracks, you have to make him the favorite at Atlanta. He has won five of the last 11 races there, and four of the nine since the track was reconfigured in 1997. He also lost the spring race there by a nose to the late Dale Earnhardt in 2000. . . . But the hottest driver the last three races at Atlanta has been Jerry Nadeau, who won in the fall of 2000, finished third in the spring race last year and would have won last November had he not run out of gas on the last lap. . . . Atlanta also has the best recent batting average, .500, of squeaker finishes of any non-restrictor plate track. Last spring, Kevin Harvick beat Jeff Gordon by .006 of a second–the closest Cup margin of victory, anywhere, in the past eight years.
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Ehinton@tribune.com
