It would seem that someone has finally listened to the fans of open wheel racing in North America.

http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/open-wheel-peace-at-hand//P1/

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).

Is it too early to say roll on 2009??