HARRISBURG, N.C. — Although the American Le Mans Series has said that the merger of the IRL and Champ Car championships into a single title chase will have no effect on the ALMS’s 2008 schedule, which includes three Champ Car venues, NSSN has learned that the North Georgia-based sports-car tour is indeed evaluating its options.
Chief among them is the Houston street event which will be left out of the combined Champ Car-IRL tour. According to some insiders, the financial situation at Houston may preclude the staging of the temporary parking lot affair in 2008, which could leave the ALMS with a hole in its spring schedule.
During the 1970s and ’80s there was traditionally a spring sprint race format round of the old International Motor Sport Ass’n-sanctioned Camel GT series at Road Atlanta, a track now owned by the Panoz Motorsports Group, and one that could be pressed into service as a Houston substitute by the ALMS, which is likewise part of the same Panoz organization. However, sources say that given the timing, it would be difficult, at best, to move the Houston date to Road Atlanta.
While the ALMS works out what it will do this week about the Texas affair, it seems almost certain that its other two Champ Car co-feature weekends, Long Beach and Road America, will remain on its schedule, Road America becoming a headlining show for the Panoz-owned series in light of the fact that in 2007 the ALMS drew a far larger crowd for its Saturday event than Champ Car did for its race on Sunday.
Given the fact that many of the details of the IRL-Champ Car merger either remain to be worked out, or have yet to be announced, the ripple down effects on the ALMS remain speculative.
“We have been asked by many to speculate on how this transition will affect these events and other aspects of our business, including the four development series that we are proud to sanction,” ALMS COO Tim Mayer said Friday in a statement. “Many details have yet to be worked out, so it is simply too soon to know all of these answers, and we do not think it is productive to speculate. However, we believe that it will affect our participation in the events very little.”
What is clear is that in a time when rising costs have brought different segments of the sport together in more and more “combined” weekends, the effects of what happens in one venue has a tremendous impact throughout the whole of the North American racing industry, not just within its own segment.