If a tree falls in the forest but there’s no one there to hear, does it make any sound? If there’s more interesting racing than NASCAR going on in America right now, but hardly anyone is paying attention, does it really matter?
That is the latest quandary of the Indy Racing League.
There has been no clearer demonstration of what is currently wrong with the IRL than last Sunday’s road race at Watkins Glen, N.Y.
Here you had the league’s two best–and only–hopes for seizing American and international attention, Danica Patrick and Marco Andretti.
A victory, or at least another dazzling finish, by either would have resounded in the public mind via newspaper headlines and the Internet, stirring thoughts that, “Hey, maybe I should watch this stuff next time.”
Next time in this case is Saturday night at Texas Motor Speedway, consistently the IRL’s best-drawing venue outside Indianapolis itself. The telecast will be prime time on ESPN. What a promotion the network, and the flamboyant TMS moguls, could have conducted with Marco and/or Danica coming in just off spectacular finishes.
But at the Glen, first Patrick and then Andretti were taken out–at least as they saw it–by the same driver, the literally gray-bearded Eddie Cheever.
Precious little of America was paying attention. The race drew only a 0.8 rating on ABC–terrible for a national broadcast network. And nothing came out of the Glen to make ESPN’s prospects any better for Saturday night.
Blame in the Patrick incident was questionable, but Michael Andretti was correct when he fumed in the pits about Cheever’s competence to be in the IndyCar series.
If Danica and Marco embody all that could be wonderful about the IRL, Cheever is the embodiment of all that has been makeshift about the league’s decade of existence.
Not so much a has-been as a never-was in Formula One, Cheever drifted back to the United States in the ’90s in search of a ride, any ride. The IRL was desperate for drivers, any drivers.
Cheever won the Indianapolis 500 in 1998 at the depths of the old race’s weakness in the CART-IRL schism. That remains his only major victory, unless you count four obscure victories on the IRL tour as significant.
Worse, Cheever at 47 has come out of retirement after a three-year layoff from driving.
The sad paradox is that although Cheever and his ilk shouldn’t be there, they have to be there, to fill out fields.
Marco Andretti was third and moving up, the fastest driver on the track, when he tried to dart under the lapped car of Cheever entering a corner, and Cheever drove down into him and wrecked him.
Marco can’t be held completely blameless here. A few seconds of patience, a recognition that he was rushing up on a questionable driver, and he might have gotten cleanly around Cheever. Still, Cheever was at fault.
There are just enough guys like Cheever to get in the way and snuff the still-struggling league’s occasional hints at flowering in the public eye.
“Cheever took me out on [a] restart, and that was what put us a lap down,” Patrick said.
“She did that all by herself,” Cheever countered.
After Michael Andretti called Cheever “a complete idiot,” Cheever’s retaliation was absurd.
“I earned the label of Indy 500 champion,” Cheever said, when all the knowledgeable racing world knows he won a makeshift and enfeebled event in ’98. “Those lobbing unfounded accusations at me have not.”
That was in reference to three generations of Andrettis at Indy managing only one 500 victory, by Marco’s grandfather Mario in 1969. For Cheever to imply that he has starred at Indy even in the same cosmos with the Andrettis was beyond ludicrous.
Again, this was in keeping with the IRL’s tunnel vision. Not only do the Cheevers of the world take the pizzazz out of the events, they can be arrogant about it.
And there is an even blacker result of desperate field-filling. The tragically unqualified Paul Dana died during a practice for the IRL’s season opener at Homestead-Miami this year, leaving other drivers bewildered at his failure to slow down and take precautionary measures with more than adequate time to do so.
Glen winner Scott Dixon is one of the IRL’s handful of competent drivers, but he is a less-than-flamboyant New Zealander who hasn’t captured much, if any, American imagination. The same syndrome of excellence without U.S. appeal applies to England’s Dan Wheldon, and to Brazil’s Helio Castroneves and Tony Kanaan.
When Wheldon won the 2005 Indy 500, the overwhelming news out of the Brickyard was that Danica had lost. When the enormously qualified but virtually colorless Ohioan Sam Hornish Jr. beat Marco at the finish line in this year’s 500, the story was that the 19-year-old with the globally magical surname had almost won it.
At Texas on Saturday night, there’ll almost certainly be more electrifying passing, more slingshot moves than NASCAR even hopes to re-muster with its Car of Tomorrow concept.
But that will likely occur among a handful of drivers Americans just haven’t embraced. And if one of the two drivers they could enthusiastically embrace should rush to the fore . . . well . . . you’ve still got the Cheevers to snuff the pizzazz.
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ehinton@tribune.com
