Christopher Pook, CART’s “If anybody can save it he can” new CEO, has a long-range engine plan that could regain some favor with the world’s top automobile manufacturers–assuming Pook can keep CART afloat through two interim seasons with his newly announced spec engine from Ford Cosworth.
The CART series runs at the Chicago Motor Speedway Sunday for the fourth time.
By 2005, Pook wants a normally aspirated (non-turbo) engine of CART’s design, rather than the rival Indy Racing League’s.
“And in all probability it will be gasoline-fueled,” he says, “because that’s what the world’s automobile manufacturers understand.”
That indeed would be attractive to manufacturers who have felt side-tracked with methanol-burning Indy-car engines. The world’s other two major series, NASCAR and Formula One–and all of their minor-league divisions–are gasoline-powered.
While conceding that stopping the hemorrhage of teams “is one way you could look at” his decision to go to the spec turbo engine next season, Pook claims another strong motive: He saw the futility of trying to gain “compatibility” with IRL rules, “only to be summarily rejected,” he says.
IRL czar Tony George “basically [disdains] any compatibility, any getting together,” Pook says. So, Pook saw no point in adopting new chassis and IRL-like normally aspirated engines that would have amounted to “constantly playing follow the leader to the IRL. Forget it.”
Conceding the move of Honda and Toyota and their vast financial resources is a pendulum-swing of money from CART to the IRL for next season, Pook adds, “but it’s a pendulum-swing of problems too.”
He means the shifting of skyrocketing costs of competing from CART to the IRL, which previously prided itself on low-cost racing.
And he pinpoints the IRL’s own mountainous task, as a series limited to oval tracks: “I am not convinced open-wheel racing on ovals can compete with NASCAR.”
That, if anything, is an understatement. Open-wheel cars inherently cannot beat and bang on each other–they would “climb wheels” with, and therefore flip, each other. Further, the smaller Indy cars with their tiny numbers are much harder for the human eye to follow than NASCAR–and if the crowds can’t tell who’s passing whom, the show biz appeal is stifled.
As for CART’s dwindling number of oval appearances, “We have got Chicago coming up (this weekend at Chicago Motor Speedway in Cicero) and we will see how we do,” Pook says. “And we’ll see if the fans want that brand of racing.”
Pook is far likelier to hinge CART’s survival and/or recovery on road and street racing. He made his name as promoter of CART’s most successful event, the Long Beach Grand Prix, for the past 25 years.
