As anyone who has been following the NASCAR blogs page knows over the last week or two I've been writing opinions and posting links for Robin Miller's articles on the Indycar/Champ Car merger from the speedtv website.
My general opinion, and that of quite a lot of the people who took the time to comment on my other posts, could be paraphrased as such "Great News....but".
We've had concerns over the tracks, with the possible loss of venerable events such as those in Toronto and Cleveland, in favour of a very oval friendly calender. The worry about the road-course specialists being outsted by teams who are suddenly looking at a whole new type of races.
Overall, we liked the idea, but we'd rather that sorted it out now and had the first season of unified racing in 2009, rather than cobble together an eleventh hour deal that had more holes in it that a moth-eaten jumper.
Yet it appears a gigantic hole has appeared around Long Beach and Montegi - here's a link to Miller's latest article.
Two equal points scoring races for the same series on different continents, consecutive days, using different cars. Oh dear.
I think this is a sign that this merger needs to be worked out properly. They're trying to patch-over, over a decade's worth of divergence, in technology, events - everything, in 10 days. It is quite frankly impossible. The various parties - the heads of the series, the team owners, the track owners - need to spend a year sitting down to work this out properly, or I fear we're headed for an entire season of this type of madness.
Announce that they're merging for 2009 now and it could be even better, they then get a year not only to iron out the mountainous creases, but garner the no doubt greater sponsorshipa and TV deals a combined series will bring, plus get additional teams in on a newly profitable series.
The Montegi vs. Long Beach disagreement has been solved, with the Montegi race rumoured to be moving to October, and obviously something close to a complete agreement reached, enough for owners in the series to believe they're headed for a single series.
A clutch of the big teams from Champ Car appear to have agreed to move over, with the only major exception being Minardi USA, which obviously increases the field and competition for the new season.
However, I'm still a bit worried. It still looks like a bunch of the road courses will be lost - Laguna Seca, Cleveland Airport, the two (admittedly awful) Champ Car races in Europe last year. This is one area where the Indycar Series seems to have the huge advantage. Champ Car races on a lot of the well known street circuits - Long Beach, Toronto, Surfers' Paradise - while these may be incorporated into the new calendar they may be lost. And I'd rather see these tracks, all very different put in, even if it comes at the expense of some of the oval tracks the IRL currently use. If some of these tracks are dropped long term, am I the only one who can see Kentucky vs. NASCAR style law suits on the horizon.
Also we're probably looking at a bunch of drivers out of work. Most of the CCWS drivers are road course specialists - Justin Wilson, Robert Doorboos, Will Power, to my mind only Paul Tracy has oval experience. With these guys getting them into a series which is mainly run on ovals, is like trying to put a square peg in a round (or oval) hole. My fear is that what looks like a good idea on paper may cause teams to drop out through lack of drivers/results/sponsorhship, or the quality of the field to drop by engaging unknown drivers simply for their oval know-how.
Even if they do run in the same series there will still be two very distinct groups or teams and drivers, and this division may take years to disappear, and while it still exists the future of open-wheel racing is still in the balance.
I'm hoping this isn't what I fear, which is a speedy merger for it's own sake, where not everything has been sorted out, and the problems are more than likely to tear the two apart again.
Since the IRL/CART split in the 90's both series have been hemoraging big names and teams, not only to each other, but more recently as NASCAR becomes the sporting juggernaut it's become names have started to leap to the cars with fenders.
Although the article says the two could be united for the 2008 series, surely this is unlikely. The meshing of the events and the teams. The fact that the two series run totally different tracks, with totally different cars. The fact there's only a matter of weeks until the series start to kick off. I think the best we can hope for is a combined 2009 series, which despite putting us through another year of two quite uninteresting championships, would almost certainly be better than the 11th hour hodge-podge that is likely to result from a deal done right now.
Open-wheel racing in the US needs this. There is some big sponsorship involved - McDonalds in Champ Car, Motorola in IRL, and big teams Forsythe and Newman-Haas-Lanigan, versus Penske, Ganassi and Andretti. They both have big name drivers (despite the fact that several have decamped) and historic races - Indy, Long Beach, Toronto, Cleveland (and it's crash friendly first turn).
An idea, I shamelessly stole from Tez, please forgive me. Except without the pictures, because I don't know how.
2008 marks a whole new chapter in the history of British drivers in international motorsport.
British drivers continue to be very well represented in F1 in 2008. The most experienced active driver in the field continues to be Scot, David Coulthard, as he enters his fourth year with the Red Bull team. There is no question that David deserves a place in F1, but the Red Bull cars have never been the most reliable. On a more positive note the input from F1 designing god Adrian Newey may start to truly show through. However, the car's reliability desperately needs improving if Coulthard and his team-mate Mark Webber are to improve on the teams finishes of last year. Coulthard may also be one to benefit from the out-lawing of Traction Control, he's driven TC less F1 cars before, which is more than some of the less experienced runners have.
Jenson Button continues to be the more over-rated driver on the face of planet earth, with '07's Pram-like Honda adding to his woes. The 2008 Honda looks less like it was painted by a 7 year old, instead looking like it's sponsored by a chewing-gum company, but whether it is any less pram-like is still up for debate. In the most recent test in Barcalona, Spain the two Hondas, including one driven by Button, were never out of the slowest 3 times set each day. However, F1 testing, especially this early is notoriously fickle, with different teams testing different things with different spec cars in different stages of development, but surely they can't make the car any slower.
Anthony Davidson is currently caught up in the mess that is Super Aguri. Despite their great showing last year, I don't think the sight of Takuma Sato passing World Champion whiner Fernando Alonso will ever start being less funny, their title sponsor SS United has pulled out and they are currently struggling to find a replacement. Should the worse happen Davidson would no-doubt be out of a drive, and probably forced to push a Honda round in testing again.
Oh, yea, some guy named Lewis is British as well. Like him of loath him, his debut season was very, very good, and only some bad luck, shocking calls by the team and a few rookie mistakes stole a title away from him in the final races. The spy-gate fiasco continues to haunt McLaren, how much this has effected their 2008 car will probably never be known. The loss of Alonso from the team may also hurt the team, they no longer have his experience and know-how of the workings of F1 cars. I think given all this to expect a repeat is too much, he may well win a few more races next season, but I don't expect him to be able to hold a candle to the Ferraris.
We know enter what we may call the 'Chip Ganassi section', if this man is not an Anglophile he has some explaining to do.
Firstly he gave NASCAR Dario. Why I don't know, Dario could well have stayed in IRL and had a whirl at defending his title, but he came to NASCAR. His Busch and ARCA results in the few races he ran last season were quite a bit less than impressive and the Dodges appear to be slowest of the 4 makers in testing. That he's well accustomed to going round ovals is sure, you don't win Indy and the title by accident, but perhaps the jump from IRL to NASCAR this quickly is just too much.
The IRL looks set to be the centre for British drivers in America, with 4 drivers currently confirmed. Dan Wheldon stays on at Ganassi alongside Scott Dixon, and may well be Dixon's biggest rival for the title with the exit of Dario and Hornish to NASCAR. He's pedigree is clear, winning the Indy and the title a few years back. The third car in the team is being driven by another Brit, this time, Alex Lloyd. He is the current champion of the IRL's developmental series, and to immediately move into a big name team says alot for his talent. Out of Ganassi-land Darren Manning continues to bother US motorsport like a moth round a lightbulb. In three years of IRL his best race finish is 4th and he's never been very consistent. The last British driver really needed looking up on Wikipedia, Jay Howard. The all-knowing source shows him as Lloyd's predecessor as Indy Pro series champion, and from the same English county as me. He joins Roth Racing as a second driver.
Champ Car, like IRL, loses it's top star, with Bourdais moving to F1. One of the drivers most likely to benefit is Justin Wilson, who finished second in 2007 to the beforementioned Frenchmen, and win a move from long term team R-sports to Newman/Haas/Lanigan, Justin may well be the favourite for the title. He is currently the only confirmed British driver in the series as 2007 driver, Dan Clarke, Ryan Daziel and Catherine Legge look set to move on, all three with nothing confirmed although rumours persist Legge may move to the DTM (where there are lots of other British drivers (but that's a whole other blog entry).
I always want to write something witty here, but my wit is always confused with something worse ------------- ------------- ----NASCAR and Auto Racing in general mostly here, but I get distracted by shiny sporting objects as well and give them an airing too---------- ------------- -----Pastimes include rooting for the underdog and trying to fathom why Golf is considered a sport-------- ------------- ---
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money.
