“(with proper marketing and a decent TV contract)”

Get it straight. If few people had radios, and newspapers didn’t devote much attention to baseball, then nobody ever names a candy bar after some dude named Babe Ruth.

Michael Schumaker was once a nobody. If he never gets a seat in good equipment, he’s a nobody. If his races aren’t broadcast on a network that is easily accessable to the masses, he’s a nobody. If corporate sponsers see no gain in an association with him to promote their brand, he’s a nobody.

Guess what? Thanks to driving like a hero, and “(with proper marketing and a decent TV contract)”, he’s the richest and most well known racing driver in the world. A hero. Made, not born.

Every racing driver on a real hero list was a nobody. It took the exposure of their skill, and the backing of their supporters, to put them in the position of earning the reknown and respect the title implies.

So how many heroes might be racing in the IndyCar Series today? None, if the availabilty of major network broadcasting does not improve, and the marketing of individual drivers is not undertaken by corporate sponsors.

Even then, your new list contains a lot of dead wood. Graham Rahal and Marco Andretti will never be heroes. Not until either kid learns to drive like one.

As a nice bonus at the end, we get a chapter devoted to Newman’s street cars over the years. Not only was there the Porsche Super 90-powered ’53 Beetle in the early days; Newman decided that wasn’t enough, so in 1969 he commissioned a Ford 351-powered Beetle. In the 1980s and 1990s, Newman drove some hot engine-swapped Volvo wagons. How about an ’88 740GLE with a 400-horse turbo Buick V6? Or a supercharged Ford small-block in a ’96 Volvo 960 wagon?

Most Americans want to win again…it’s not about failing, it’s about winning but there has been alot of losses all the way around. If the IRL cou;ld stimulate some American innovations like an American Hybrid,(Maybe a new battery or some real engineering for our failing American automobile industry, encorporated into an Indy race-car.) Honestly hope that the guys in charge are reading some of the books that George has on his site, because they need some real American inspiration and less selfish ambition!

…I would love to see more American engineering that address our real-time problems on the road. Safety first!

Quick point – the Panoz was never legislated out…Phil Giebler crashed trying to put one in the I500 field in 2008.

But it was/is at a significant weight disadvantage to the newer Dallara evolutions. The last team to use the Panoz full time was Rahal Letterman which switched in Texas 2006 (as you noted in an earlier column) which pretty much torpedo’d that team’s competitiveness for the remainder of that season. (although Dixon had won at the Glen in a Panoz the week before, if memory serves)

The topic here was the cars, not the drivers. Of course those two topics MIGHT be intertwined. You do (correctly) point out that the entire situation began to spiral out of control even before the split. We couldn’t see it very well back then, because the circles around the toilet still felt like it was just the current of the ocean (I’m being a little overdramatic here for effect). This was around the time when the driver lineup swung from primarily American to increasingly foreign. Why did this happen? It was because the cost of the cars and the cost with running an IndyCar team took off, from $1-2 million per car or whatever it was in the early ’80s to $10-20 million per car in the mid- to late-’90s. The question was: who had this kind of money? It wasn’t short track stars, it was “F1 dropouts and guys you never heard of”. That kind of scratch wouldn’t get you much in the way of an F1 drive, but it’d get you topline equipment in IndyCar. We’ve been through several iterations of that same situation, but we’re basically in the same place. Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty toil in a paying gig in GrandAm, meanwhile we get non-superstar types like Mario Moraes, Milka Duno, EJ Viso and Vitor Meira (ignoring the nice stuff I said here about Vitor a month or so ago). Those are all folks who I’d either never heard of before they got in an IndyCar or people who do not belong in an IndyCar (I’ll leave it to the imagination who belongs in which column).

This is where we come back full circle to the new car. If the new car is much cheaper to buy and run (as they’re targeting), then a $1-2 million budget will allow you to hire whoever you want to put behind the wheel. You want Chad Boat and Levi Jones? Sure, go gt $2.5 million, go write your check to Dallara or Delta for your cars, buy your hauler, hire a couple of engineers and some mechanics, and away you go. With a revamping of the price structure of the 2012 car, there’ll likely need to be a ravamping of the price structure of the Lights cars (who would then be in direct competition with the big cars, budgetwise), and a revamping of the cost structure of the entire rest of the ladder. You make the cars cheaper and you can put anybody you want in there. Everybody (and I mean that completely literally) wins. THAT is the point.

I enjoy reading comments from geeks like yourself (settle down, its just a joke).

Folks like you and others here want to change the cars and change the TV networks and change the leadership and change the month of May and change everything back to like it was in the swell ole’ days of the early 90′s, when CART was the bestest racing series that ever lived and all of their races were sold out and NASCAR and F1 was on welfare trying to keep up.

Lets just change everything, throw it all up against the wall and hope it sticks. Then repeat after the finish of the season. And if it doesn’t work (and it usually doesn’t) we can always blame Tony George (since we can blame Tony George for everything except the War on Terror).

Unfortunately you are all missing what has TRULY been wrong with the sport for a couple of DECADES now. The driver lineup. Racing has ALWAYS been about the drivers. It always will.

Forming the IRL was a mistake. Tony made a ton of mistakes. Goody. We get it. CART was a mess too with owners running the show and looking out for their own self-interests first, second and third. They had bad leadership, with CEO’s coming and going and a business model that was flimsy long-term. Both entities sucked and both were losers. OK, lets move on. Continuing to beat this drum got tired about 8 or 9 years ago. We were all fans of a LOSER and are still fans of a LOSER. Even the Detroit Lions have fans.

Here is the real deal…When Indy Cars had American heroes and legendary American talent (and kept them in the sport for more then a few years), they were a legit American series with LEGIT fans (not just “event” fans and street racing gawkers and Marlboro employees pretending to be fans) and back then Indy Cars could compete with NASCAR. When they started losing these legends and started replacing them with Formula 1 dropouts and guys that nobody had ever heard of before they got here and their leadership started becoming more interested in being a F1 Lite series instead of a REAL American Racing series, the eventual decline of the sport was on its way. The IRL had nothing to do with this. The Dallara had nothing to do with this. Kevin Kalkhoven had nothing to do with this. Tony George had nothing to do with this. The DP 01 had nothing to do with this. This started happening long before 1995 and is still going on in 2010.

It won’t matter a hill of beans how many races Scott Dixon or Vitor Meira or Will Power or Ryan Briscoe or Tony Kanaan win in Indy Cars. They might all be nice guys and good drivers. But unfortunately nobody cares. They don’t sell and they aren’t going to spur folks to suddenly watch the sport again. Now, if Graham Rahal, Marco Andretti, AJ Allmendinger, Alex Gurney, Sam Hornish Jr, JR Hildebrand, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Townsend Bell, Kasey Kahne, Jason Leffler and Buddy Rice were winning races and battling with one another and running into one another every-now-and-then, at least (with proper marketing and a decent TV contract) you MIGHT lure some American eye-balls to the sport again. At least you would give yourself a chance. And that’s not being “xenophobic”. That’s just being a realist.

NASCAR didn’t get huge because of cool cars or close racing or marketing gimmicks or TV coverage. They took off and continue to lap the field, because they had Gordon and Stewart and Earnhardt and Earnhardt Jr and Wallace and Elliott and Labonte and Busch and Busch and Waltrip and Martin and new talent ALWAYS coming through the pipeline to add to the show or eventually replace the legends when they leave. They figured out LONG ago its about the drivers. And when Indy Car basically lets them have whoever they want and choose all the best American drivers, then it makes it even easier for them to dominate the scene.

When AOW figures this out again, maybe they will have a chance. If they don’t, they won’t.

An awful lot of that “go down to a speed shop” element can be rekindled if they choose the right engine spec, and let independent builders and teams screw together the best piece they can devise. That just takes an announcement of number of cylinders, displacement, and boost level.

Instead, they have been sitting in wait for manufacturers to invest millions, and come up with an engine that everybody has to run and nobody is allowed to tune.

And they can’t design new chassis until they set a freaking engine spec anyway. It took all of two days for me to identify what the choice should be, and find a list of engine builders who were already building racing engines to fit the spec.

With some of these choices they make, it comes down to a lot more than wasted time and opportunity. Maybe the bigger roadblock is the time it takes to line up big money deals between the right set of power brokers.
That makes for doors which are harder to unlock. At the speed shop, all it takes is a simple key.

That’s one reason why the car matters, and how it affects who we pay attention to. But none of them were famous when they showed up.

That takes a lot of fans watching a lot of races. Me, I watched a lot of races this year. So when Mario Moraes and Mike Conway both picked up like 15 positions to get on the podium, I started paying attention to how they did the rest of the season. Never had heared of them before, I bet you haven’t until now.

In the old days, that’s when a better team with a bigger budget would hire one of them, and see what he could do in good gear. Not so much now: few teams can hire drivers, and the cars are all far too close to equal.

No fans = no exposure = no heroes. Simple enough.
Same cars = less challenge = predictable results = no heroes = no fans. Wait, I’m seeing a trend.

Of couse the car matters, used to be that even the CARS had fans. When there was variety, and a lot of people paying attention.

So, I’m a 52 year old mechanic. There’s a whole lot of reasons why a new chassis design means jack squat to me. I hope for variety, and a design that limits downforce and puts a greater demand on car control.

Maybe then some young kid who you never heard of gets a chance to become a hero. Because he shows the people watching he can drive like one.

Unless you’re a hot chick, that is – that makes it a little easier to become more than ” lame and uninteresting to the American public”.

Peace out, Smokey

The other hand worries that it’ll end up being like hydroplane speed boat racing: something that’s even more remote from normal life and only a handful of people will be engaged by it. We’ve already moved well-away from the era when you could go down to a speed shop in Indianapolis or Los Angeles or Daytona Beach (or fill in your favorite locale) and build a car and maybe it’ll make the 500. I think a no-matter-how-tenuous “I could do that” dream is necessary for popular sports. You don’t get that in auto racing any more.

If I have to pick something, I like the idea bandied about by Cavin & Lee on their podcast–the basic Dallara chassis with a lot of room for adjustments and experiments, so maybe, just maybe Sarah Fisher’s engineer might hit upon a combination that makes her competitive in a year when Penske misses, and you end up with a greater degree of uncertainty.