You know, it’s awfully hard for me to imagine that the Indy Car/CART/Champ Car feud is over.
When it began, I was 14 years old, and back in the summer of 1979, I hated CART with a purple passion. My life was centered around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Dan Gurney, Pat Patrick and Roger Penske were messing around with it for money, power and greed.
That’s the way it seemed back in 1979, anyway. When you’re that age, your emotions tend to overload your logic, and I didn’t understand exactly what was going on. I just knew that Gurney’s “white paper” was the catalyst for change into something that I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like.
Little did I know that it would take 29 years to come full circle.
The United States Auto Club, another fixture of my youth at Winchester Speedway, was another of those sacred cows that the CART guys messed with, another mark in the ledger against them.

What did we prove with this little exercise in the free market? Well, we proved that the smart money isn’t always as smart as it thinks it is, and tradition, while important, is not worth hamstringing your future over.

Over the years, the hard feelings lessened somewhat, because the only time I really paid attention any more was during the month of May. That was like always, but with a hint of tension at times that you felt like the breath of an early spring thunderstorm.
In 1993, when Tony George left a CART board meeting humbled and immensely cheesed off at the CART elite, the idea for the IRL was born. Three years later, it was on the track, and 15 years after that, the Indy Racing League (IndyCar Series) is one entity again.
Could it have been prevented, this fratricidal struggle for keys to a kingdom that once stretched across half the world and now is but a tenth of its former self? Probably not, because USAC at the time was as hidebound and superior as the AAA was before it, and the CART folks were businessmen who were unused to being told they couldn’t do something and had arguably better ideas for marketing the series.
What did we prove with this little exercise in the free market? Well, we proved that the smart money isn’t always as smart as it thinks it is, and tradition, while important, is not worth hamstringing your future over.
A little bit of give on each side, and things might have gotten better quicker and not allowed NASCAR to overwhelm American motorsport the way it did. NASCAR now has a three-mile lead on the newly reconstituted open-wheel series, but at least the Indy cars are out of the garage and back on the track.
If you really wanted to, you could go back and point out all the good things and the bad things about the split, why it happened the first time and what led to the second and final break. I’ll simply say this: Now that it is all one big family again, it’s time to get busy and build a viable alternative to the monster that is NASCAR.
No grandstanding, chest-thumping or sniping allowed, boys. It should be head-down-and-fanny-up and eyes on the prize, or NASCAR will put you another lap off the lead. It takes time, I realize, and nothing worthwhile was ever built overnight, but this is another chance to do things the right way.
The original CART bunch has thinned out, with only Penske and Carl Haas left, and the new guys coming over from Champ Car will figure it out soon enough. A 25-27-car field every week? A chance to race at places where you can make a name for yourself? A couple of viable feeder series in Indy Lights and Toyota Atlantic…we’ve got something going here.
Will it rival NASCAR one day? I tend to think it will. NASCAR seems at times like it’s headed for some kind of crossroads, whether it’s the new car or sky-high prices or general malaise.
It’s hard to believe, but that passion from 1979 is no longer purple and the hate is a thing of the past. Let’s go racing, and see where it takes us.