Kenny Brack remembers the first time he confronted an oval, which looks as innocent as a sleeping baby.
Already he was an experienced driver, a blossoming star who had accumulated victories on a variety of road courses. But now he was a rookie preparing for his Indy Racing League debut, and his challenge was the 1-mile oval of the Phoenix International Raceway.
“When you see an oval, you don’t think that much of it. Obviously, it looks pretty simple compared to a road course,” he said as he prepared for the Miller Lite 250 on Sunday at the oval Milwaukee Mile. “But then you sit in a car for the first time and you start to realize how fast you need to go to be competitive. That’s what’s mind-boggling when you haven’t done it before.
“You have to have guts, really. To drive as fast as these cars go between concrete walls, it takes a lot of courage. To steer the car through the corner may not be any different from what you do on a road course. But the pure speed difference is just amazing.
“Oval racing is as tough as any other form of motorsports.”
It is also, concurrently, the form of racing most familiar to the U.S. fan and most endangered on the CART FedEx Championship Series. Events on ovals have drawn so poorly in recent years that CART’s current 19-race schedule includes only three ovals in this country and three overseas.
More and more it has gravitated toward road courses such as Elkhart Lake and street courses such as Long Beach, where the race itself can be presented as a part of an activity-filled weekend. More and more it has pulled away from places like the 99-year-old Milwaukee Mile and the Chicago Motor Speedway, the 1-mile oval in Cicero that CART visits for the fourth time June 30.
Discouraged by the meager crowds at ovals, team owner Bobby Rahal said CART should run only road and street courses to distinguish it from the all-oval IRL.
“It seems like the two [series] are going down two distinctly different paths,” he said. “I’ve always said, if one was road racing and one was ovals and everybody met [for the Indianapolis 500], it’s AFL-NFL, isn’t it?”
“One thing that makes CART stand out . . . is it’s a very diversified championship,” countered Brack, who last season drove for Rahal and now drives for Target Chip Ganassi Racing. “You have to be good on road courses and ovals and street courses and superspeedways and all kinds of stuff to win the championship here. It puts a lot of responsibility on the teams and the drivers to master a lot of tracks.”
Brack certainly has mastered the oval since his first experience with it in 1997. He won on three of them the next year, and in 1999, he won the Indianapolis 500. He then jumped from the IRL to CART and last season won on four ovals.
This year he has yet to enjoy such success. He arrived in Milwaukee after finishing fourth while defending his title in Japan and 11th in last Sunday’s Indianapolis 500. Yet the oval is clearly a form he has come to appreciate.
“You can’t make any mistakes,” Brack said. “A slight mistake on a road course, you might get away with it, or you put a wheel in the grass and it’s no big deal. A slight mistake on the oval, that means a meeting with the concrete wall.”
