jueves, mayo 27, 2010

As the American open-wheel war dragged on, CART ultimately imploded and the IRL started losing drivers to NASCAR, but there were still two hopes for the future -- Danica Patrick and Marco Andretti

George's devastating victory


Hinton By Ed Hinton ESPN.com
Editor's note: ESPN.com senior writer Ed Hinton has spent more than 35 years covering motorsports across the globe for entities including Sports Illustrated, The National Sports Daily, Tribune Newspapers and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This four-part series, The Damage Done, is his memoir of what he saw and reported leading up to the American open-wheel civil war and the consequences it wrought. This is Part IV, Hell Of A Vision.

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV

Juan Pablo Montoya 
Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty ImagesThe milk tasted good for Juan Pablo Montoya after winning the 2000 Indianapolis 500. It was a sweet victory for CART owners and fans, too. Montoya thrashed his IRL competition, making a statement about which series had the better drivers -- and teams.
A year after Leo Mehl, the executive director of the IRL, had said the CART teams "would get their doors blown off" if they ventured to Indy in IRL equipment, team owner Chip Ganassi took him up on the challenge.
It was the first return to Indy by a CART team.
In 2000, Ganassi bought IRL cars for the Indy 500 only, for a team that featured Jimmy Vasser but starred '99 CART champion Juan Pablo Montoya, who was essentially farmed out to Ganassi by Formula One team owner Frank Williams.
IRL partisans considered Ganassi's entry the first stage of a CART surrender.
Some surrender.
Ganassi's team would crush the IRL competition.
For Montoya, the Indy 500 was child's play. Conventional wisdom had been to proceed cautiously through the first 400 miles and get the car just right for the final 100. Montoya shattered that notion, running all-out, all the time, due to his F1 training.
The "rookie" dominated, taking the lead on the 27th lap. From there he led all but six of the total 200 laps, falling out of the lead only briefly after pit stops. It was as near to a perfect Indy 500 as had ever been driven.
So much for the CART teams getting their doors blown off.
Mehl had agreed from the outset to serve only three years at the helm of the IRL. By 2001, with Mehl retired and his prediction refuted, storied Team Penske returned to Indy and won it with Helio Castroneves.
In two 500s, the score was CART 2, IRL 0. There was absolutely no doubt which side had the quality and the talent.
But later that year, CART suffered the debacle at Texas. Running their own cars, much faster than those of the IRL, on the 24-degree banking, drivers became disoriented due to high G-forces. The cars couldn't be adjusted enough. CART physicians, including Dr. Steve Olvey, called conditions too dangerous. The race was cancelled. Texas Motor Speedway sued CART, and the expenses of defending that suit, plus the settlement, plunged CART further toward bankruptcy.

By '02 it was clear that any reconciliation would now be far too little, far too late. And yet, for the 500 itself and the 500 only, most of the top CART teams returned that May, in IRL equipment.
You could say everybody who was anybody in American open-wheel racing was back at the 500. Trouble was, hardly anybody there was anybody anymore on the world stage of motor racing, with the exceptions of Al Unser Jr. and Michael Andretti, both in the twilight of their careers.
Team Penske in '02 became the first major, full-time defector from CART to the IRL. Roger Penske's pragmatism was showing: he could run Indy regularly, and the pickings were easy both in the 500 and out on the IRL tour.
Helio Castroneves
Miller Carr/AFP/Getty ImagesHelio Castroneves was another CART interloper when he won the 2001 Indy 500, but he -- and his team -- were full-fledged members of the IRL when he won in 2002 for owner Roger Penske.
But such movement now meant little to the general public, what with both leagues struggling and NASCAR all the rage.
Indeed, between qualifying and the 500, on a midweek flight from Indianapolis to Atlanta, I sat directly behind Castroneves. Nobody else on the plane seemed to recognize the defending Indy 500 champion, who was trying for a repeat win.
By comparison, NASCAR stars such as Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. flew only on private jets, not daring to take commercial flights, lest they be mobbed by fans.
Then on Thursday of race week, another wall collapsed on beleaguered CART, with one announcement.
"Today, American Honda announces that we plan to enter the Indy Racing League next season, 2003," Robert Clarke, the manufacturer's U.S. racing director, said at a news conference.
In the interview room I turned in my seat, looked at fellow journalists Robin Miller and Gordon Kirby and mouthed, "It's over." Meaning the war. This wasn't quite checkmate, but CART was now being checked at every move.
Mercedes-Benz had already pulled out of CART, and now Honda was leaving. That left Ford as the sole supplier, and a tenuous one at that. Honda would join Toyota, GM and Nissan among IRL engine suppliers.

When Castroneves won his second straight Indy 500, this time as an IRL points competitor in a controversy with CART driver Paul Tracy, favoritism was charged.
On the next-to-last lap, Tracy of CART's Team Green passed Castroneves just as a caution came out. IRL officials ruled Tracy had passed a split second after, rather than a split second before, caution lights had come on in the turns and in the cockpits, officially stopping all racing for position.
The win was awarded to Castroneves, and made official after an initial appeal the following day. The appealing went on for months of examination of electronic data, but Castroneves kept the win.

CART was checked again from another direction when the series sponsor, FedEx, pulled out at the end of '02.
Struggling to restructure, CART even jettisoned its name.
For 2003, embracing its remaining sponsors, tire supplier and engine supplier, the series gave itself arguably the most awkward and cumbersome name in the history of motor racing: Bridgestone Presents The Champ Car World Series Powered by Ford.
Intending humor, I asked the publicists for the carcass of CART if we could shorten the series name in print to "BPCCWSPF." Nobody laughed.
By the end of '03, with its stock trading at pennies per share, the organization declared bankruptcy.

Here sat Tony George, reigning over scorched earth. Here sat the two of us, in his private suite, high in the tower above the pit road at Indianapolis, with a panoramic view of the world's most massive grandstands, which were empty.
This was in May of 2004, eight years into the war, on a late qualifying day for the 500. Only occasionally would a lonely sounding car rumble onto the track.
In bankruptcy court, George had bid to buy the carcass of CART, but the judge had ruled in favor of a small group bent on keeping the body twitching, rather than driving a stake through its heart, as George would have.
For a man who had all but won the war (but what had he won, really?), George seemed very tired that afternoon. At first I thought he must not have slept much lately. But as an hour or so passed, I wondered if this was war-weariness, deep and lasting.
For all he'd tried to do, all he'd spent, all the enormity of the controversies he had stirred, the IRL had become "another CART," critics said -- dominated by foreign drivers the public simply wasn't embracing.
Now he yawned occasionally as I reminded him of all the drivers who could have bolstered his domain, who had started out in open-wheel cars, but had been lost to NASCAR: Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne … and soon, defections to NASCAR from the top ranks of the IRL would start, as drivers chose to move up to the dominant series in America -- the real and clear winner of the Indy car civil war.

Tony George Having missed the opportunity with Jeff Gordon, we tried to create some opportunities by having the IRL be predominantly an open-wheel, oval series, to afford some guys some opportunities to advance. Some did, with varying degrees of success. But for the most part, car owners again didn't want to take the risks. -- Tony George
Years ago, under the old United States Auto Club feeder system, the dirt-trackers would have come here.
"Years ago meaning decades ago, meaning the '50s, '60s, possibly even the '70s," he said, clearly meaning the ladder -- the steps necessary to aspire to Indy car racing -- was long gone.
George thought back through history, back to his teenage years and young adulthood, when the CART barons came and took over.
"Once USAC ceased sanctioning the championship trail, all races beyond Indianapolis, is when that [the USAC ladder] ceased to be the case," he said. "The CART car owner organization, which was comprised primarily of road racing car owners making up their fields, they were more oriented toward developing more road races as opposed to more oval races … and as a result they brought [in] drivers that would contest for a championship. At that point the focus and the emphasis shifted."
Now George included a name that had been in his mind as he'd founded the IRL.
"Having missed the opportunity with Jeff Gordon, we tried to create some opportunities by having the IRL be predominantly an open-wheel, oval series, to afford some guys some opportunities to advance. Some did, with varying degrees of success.
"But for the most part, car owners again didn't want to take the risks."
The IRL owners, many of whom he'd subsidized -- by that point rumored to be to the tune of more than $250 million of the Hulman-George fortune -- had become like the CART owners, seeking drivers who could buy rides.
Even A.J. Foyt had gone international, with various drivers, and even won the '99 Indy 500 with Sweden's Kenny Brack.
"They were either going for drivers with experience and money, or drivers with money," George said.
The one exception had fizzled: "I think everybody knows that John Menard had an opportunity to sign Tony Stewart to a long-term deal," George said. "He chose not to, or he wasn't successful in doing it."
This, even though Menard, George reminded me, was (and remains) a multibillionaire.
And now George acknowledged something monumental, something impossible to overcome, something that flashed the sign, "Game Over."
The USAC ladder system was impossible to restore because it no longer worked for Indy cars at all. It had become, in fact, a fine feeder system for NASCAR.
Through evolution, rear-engine Indy cars by now behaved very differently than front-engine sprint cars and midgets, which now behaved more like front-engine NASCAR cars.
"As far as having a feel for the way the cars drive, off the right rear, coming up through those series [of sprints, midgets and Silver Crown on ovals] -- [drivers are] probably more suited today towards a career path toward NASCAR. They seem to do better," George said.
The USAC system that had produced A.J. Foyt, Johnny Rutherford, Mario Andretti and all the Unsers for Indy was now churning out the likes of Gordon, Stewart, Newman and Kahne for NASCAR.
Midget Cars
AP Photo/Will PowersMidget race cars were once one of the perfect stepping-stones to the Indy 500 and a career in open-wheel racing. By 2004, Tony George knew the old USAC ladder system was much better suited to NASCAR than it was his own series.
So George's quintessential intent for the IRL, bringing heartland Americans to Indy from the dirt tracks, was finished.
Any ladder system for Americans to Indy now must include a progression of rear-engine formulas.
For that, "We have a sort of disjointed, dysfunctional ladder system here in the United States," George said. "It's not as clearly defined as it is in Europe."
What was needed? He described a system America didn't have, and still doesn't, and probably won't have anytime soon:
"If we had a better single-seat, rear-engine formula ladder system to encourage and develop young American drivers from go-karts up through IndyCar [now the brand name of his series] to Formula One, there'd probably be a lot more American drivers. Not from the USAC sprint, midget, Silver Crown divisions, but American drivers nonetheless. Someone like a Sam Hornish or an Alex Barron who grows up with an orientation toward racing formula cars."
(Hornish, George's best American hope of the time, would of course eventually defect to NASCAR himself.)
At this point, I thought, "Game Over."
With one feeder system diverted to NASCAR, and the proper feeder system virtually nonexistent, just where was George supposed to get stellar young American drivers the public would embrace?
Out of the blue?
Maybe. Just maybe …

A few days after my long, subdued interview with George, Bobby Rahal -- a one-time CART hard-liner, who now owned a team in the IRL with TV host David Letterman -- held a news conference.
Beside him sat a diminutive, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with a cold, determined glare. Rahal would enter a car for her in the next year's Indy 500.
Danica Patrick.
I went straight back to my laptop in the media center and wrote immediately that the next year, a woman would enter the 500 capable of winning -- not just participating, as Janet Guthrie and Lyn St. James and Sarah Fisher had done before her.
I'd been introduced to Danica by St. James some years earlier, when Danica was 15, a go-kart champion and interning with St. James' team at Indy. St. James had advised me I'd better talk to this teenager and pay attention to her career, because she was going somewhere.
Danica soon set off for England, to train in the British "schooling formulas" -- a ladder system starting with simple cars such as Formula Vauxhall, and building up. It was slam-bang racing, brutal, cold, unforgiving -- and rife with British mechanics bewildered by the notion of a woman racing.
At a Formula One race in '99, I was working on a story about whether any Americans had hopes of an F1 ride, and three-time world champion Jackie Stewart enunciated one name clearly and firmly to me: "Danica Patrick."
Stewart and his son Paul, with Ford Motor Co., were backing Danica in the schooling formulas and hoped to move her up to Formula 3, only two steps away from F1.
But after Danica's first year in England, Paul Stewart fell seriously ill and Danica was left pretty much on her own. Her father, T.J. Patrick, would tell me years later he'd spent about $500,000 of the family's money to keep her racing in Europe.
Coincidentally, Bobby Rahal had taken a job as team principal of the Ford-backed Jaguar F1 team. It was during his brief stint there that he discovered Danica, when she finished second at a Formula Ford festival in France.
During Indy race week of 2003, I saw one of the publicists for Rahal's Indy car team, walking maybe 30 yards away through the Speedway's enormous media center, accompanied by a tiny woman who -- there was something familiar.
It was the cold, confident glare in the eyes. Rahal had brought Danica home from England for good, and would field a car for her that year in the Formula Atlantic series in the U.S.
By May of '04, Rahal was confident enough in her ability that he called the news conference at Indy. He surprised even her. She learned along with the media that she would drive at Indy in '05.
Her response?
A cool, poker-faced, "Thanks, Bob."
As for the 500 itself that year, the winner's name, Buddy Rice, was so obscure that most of the media focused on the angle of, "David Letterman's car won the race," even though Letterman was mainly a figurehead partner with Rahal.

She arrived at Indy in '05 almost literally as a blur, clocking the fastest lap of pre-qualifying practice, 229.880 mph. In qualifying, a gust of wind kept her from winning the pole, turning her car sideways on the first of her four laps. But she caught it, and still averaged 227.773 to earn the fourth starting spot, highest to that point by a woman at Indy.
In the race, she made some mistakes early but came back to become the first woman to lead the Indy 500. She led twice, the second time being electrifying, when she blasted past Dan Wheldon with 11 laps remaining.
Danica Patrick
AP Photo/Darron CummingsWhen Danica Patrick led the 2005 Indianapolis 500 with only a few laps to go, the old speedway was abuzz. But she couldn't hold on, and her competitors backhandedly made it clear that was fine with them.
She could win this thing. For the first time in years, the hallowed old grounds were electrified, and the roar of the crowd was virtually drowning out the engine noise.
And you could sense the long-comatose Indianapolis 500's eyes flickering open.
Just as suddenly, they closed. Trying to conserve fuel to finish, Danica's crew ordered her to turn her fuel-management system from richer to leaner, stifling her car's power. Wheldon got past her with six laps left, and then came Vitor Meira and Bryan Herta, to leave her fourth at the checkered flag -- still best to that point by a female driver.
But she hadn't won, and the enormous gasp of life that had welled in Indy's throat subsided.
But not until the next race, at Texas Motor Speedway, did I realize this diminutive, determined, talented -- and, yes, she's glamorous, and she flaunts it -- woman could not save Indy car racing singlehandedly.
From the drivers' meeting at Texas, Buddy Rice emerged wearing a T-shirt that read, "Danica's Teammate."
Vitor Meira's T-shirt read, "Danica's Other Teammate."
And Dan Wheldon's T-shirt read: "Actually Won Indianapolis 500."
Cute, but the T-shirts smacked of resentment. The three young males flouted the positive impact the woman had had. They felt slighted, robbed of their own self-perceived importance.
This was a core sampling of the motley driving corps Tony George had managed to scrape together -- Rice the only American among them -- and they had a tough time accepting Danica.
She could not save the IRL; it would not let her.

Indy's eyes flickered open again in '06, late in the race, over a 19-year-old, third-generation driver from the best-known, most-beloved family in American racing: Marco Andretti.
On Friday, I sat in the team compound with Marco's "Nonno Mario," the family's Italian term for Grandpa Mario, and asked the patriarch -- the '67 Daytona 500 winner, the '69 Indy winner, the '78 F1 world champion -- if there was any realistic chance a 19-year-old rookie could win this race.
He looked me in the eye. All the sadness of the Andrettis at Indy was there, all those disappointments, all that atrocious luck for all those years for him and son Michael, Marco's father. For 37 years of Andretti tears, they had just Mario's '69 win to show.
Mario pondered for seconds; it seemed like minutes.
Then he said, "You're damn right there is." And he repeated, even more adamantly: "You're damn right there is." Again and again he repeated it, until it was but a whispered refrain
Then the haunting caveat came back.
Fast as Marco had been that month, there remained the Andrettis' longtime nemesis, the purveyor of much of their heartbreak, especially for Michael -- Roger Penske.
After the "damn right" refrain had died away, Mario sat silent for another moment, then added: "But you've still got to beat Penske."
Penske's drivers over the years had won the Indy 500 a runaway record 13 times, and now his team was going for No. 14. So it was not prescience that darkened Mario's tone; it was just reality.

With two laps left in the race, Marco shot past his father into the lead, leaving Michael doomed to an 0-15 record at Indy. But the prospect of a 19-year-old winner, an Andretti, electrified the crowd of nearly 300,000 as not even Danica Patrick had the year before.
Sam Hornish Jr. nips Marco Andretti 
Brian Spurlock/US PresswireThe crowd was electrified the final lap of the 2006 Indy 500; an Andretti -- 19-year-old Marco -- was winning ... but he had to beat Penske. Penske's Sam Hornish Jr. charged like a rocket off Turn 4, and the Andretti curse continued.
But then there appeared the nemesis, in a red-and-white blur, Sam Hornish Jr. of Team Penske, rocketing past Michael into second place and then going after Marco.
Marco at first blocked Hornish, broke his momentum and got some margin as Hornish fell back.
"That's the race," Robin Miller said to me in the media center. We both knew what that meant: the resurrection of Indy in the world's headlines the next day.
Andretti was a globally charismatic name. How deep did it run through the world's social fabric? Well, Mario wanted for his grandson the same sort of gratifying grassroots recognition he had felt, he'd told me years earlier, when he would "walk into some drugstore in some obscure section of Paris or Madrid or Sao Paulo … "
The names Andretti, and Indy, were at the brink of rocketing to the pinnacle again.
But the red-and-white nemesis kept coming, regaining ground, and Mario's words of Friday flashed through my mind: "But you've still got to beat Penske."
Hornish's car was a missile off the fourth turn, and at the checkered flag, he beat Marco by a car length.
Somehow I could sense the Indy 500's eyes closing forever, lapsing into permanent coma, at that moment. For the second year in a row, an inkling of recovery for the grand old race had flickered and then faded.

EPILOGUE

By 2008, as many Indy 500 winners (four) would try to qualify for the Daytona 500 as for the Indy 500 itself.
Juan Pablo Montoya, Dario Franchitti and Sam Hornish Jr. competed at Daytona, and '95 Indy winner Jacques Villeneuve failed to make the Daytona field.
At Indy that year, the former winners who showed up were Helio Castroneves, Dan Wheldon, Buddy Rice and Buddy Lazier.
During Daytona 500 week, on Valentine's Day, what was left of CART -- called, without sponsors, just the Champ Car World Series -- filed for its final bankruptcy.
On Feb. 22, a "merger" into the IRL was agreed to, but amounted mainly to the IRL's purchase of what few desirable assets the old rivals had left, including their highly respected medical unit, and lucrative road and street racing events such as the Long Beach Grand Prix.
Tony George finally had driven a stake through CART's heart.
But he had failed to re-Americanize Indy car racing, and in the end had to resort largely to road racing by foreign drivers for what was now known solely as the IndyCar series.
In June of 2009, George was ousted as CEO of Indianapolis Motor Speedway by his three sisters, all reportedly weary of the hemorrhaging of family money -- by this point as much as $500 million, by some estimates -- into the IRL.
George then resigned as president of the IRL.
To this day, neither Danica Patrick nor Marco Andretti has won the Indy 500. Each has but one win in the IndyCar series.
Now, Patrick is transitioning to NASCAR. While she continues to drive Indy cars, she is learning NASCAR from the ground up and is expected to land there full time in the next few years.
In January of 2010, George appeared to be disappearing from auto racing altogether, after he closed the individual IndyCar team he had founded.
He declined an update interview for this series. Lately he has refused, via e-mail, to tell me what he's up to. But word is, he's trying to reestablish the team.
The essence of Tony George's intentions, throughout the two tempestuous decades since he ascended the Indy throne, is reflected in the team's name.
He calls it Vision Racing.

Ed Hinton is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn.com.

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miércoles, mayo 26, 2010

American open-wheel racing fell further into depression by the end of 1999 as spectators were dying, drivers were dying and the IRL and CART seemed headed in the same direction

Divide widens while fatalities mount


Hinton By Ed Hinton ESPN.com
Editor's note: ESPN.com senior writer Ed Hinton has spent more than 35 years covering motorsports across the globe for entities including Sports Illustrated, The National Sports Daily, Tribune Newspapers and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This four-part series, The Damage Done, is his memoir of what he saw and reported leading up to the American open-wheel civil war and the consequences it wrought. This is Part III, Digging In.

Part I | Part II | Part III

Gonzalo Rodriguez 
Jonathan Ferrey/Getty ImagesThe death of young CART driver Gonzalo Rodriguez at Monterey, Calif., in September 1999 came during a horrible stretch of accidents on the track and in the stands for both CART and the rival IRL.
By March of 1997, the upcoming Indianapolis 500 seemed so makeshift, so gutted of the enormous public interest of yore, that some editors at Sports Illustrated were asking whether we should even staff the race.
To my knowledge, that was the first time coverage of the Indy 500 had been questioned since the magazine's launch in 1954. For decades, Indy officials' only question to SI had been whether the race was going to make the cover or not.
Editors came up with a hybrid plan for a major story. It would combine the skyrocketing popularity of NASCAR with the plummeting interest in, and the self-destruction of, Indy car racing.
I shuttled between Indy and Charlotte for weeks. Both events were besieged by rain, but Charlotte fared much better. The rain-shortened 600 was called a complete race in the wee hours of Monday, Memorial Day, leaving Jeff Gordon the winner.
It was that night that Gordon, by this point an enormous star in NASCAR, told me the story of the "Show us the money and we'll show you the seat" rejection by CART years earlier. Gordon could have been an enormous force, especially alongside Tony Stewart, for the IRL. But by this point Gordon had no interest in turning back to open-wheel, especially with its schism and questionable future.
Indy was washed out entirely on Sunday, and Monday's brief start caused more harm than good. Three cars crashed on the parade lap, more embarrassing even than the CART start at Michigan the previous year. Then rain halted the race after only 15 laps.
Finally, on Tuesday, Arie Luyendyk won the race in a confused situation over whether the caution was out or not, yelling on his radio, "What the f--- are they doing?" to his crew, meaning United States Auto Club officials.
Arie Luyendyk
Getty ImagesArie Luyendyk won the 1997 Indianapolis 500, an event plagued by rain and a timing and scoring glitch that led to the ouster of USAC as the race's sanctioning body.
This incident, along with a scoring gaffe 11 days later at Texas Motor Speedway that resulted in an embarrassing victory circle scuffle between Luyendyk and A.J. Foyt, would end USAC's 42-year reign as the sanctioning body for the Indy 500. Technically the IRL had been an arm of USAC, but now IRL CEO Tony George and executive director Leo Mehl put the league directly in charge of conducting the 500, and USAC was left to regulate only its long-running minor league series, such as sprint cars and midgets.
SI had gone to press already, Monday evening, and Indy officials were upset that I'd filed the story before their race was even completed. I never could get them to understand that the point of the story was not at all the Charlotte and Indy races themselves, but the situation in which they were run.
But it was the headline on the story that infuriated them: "What Ever Happened to Indy?"
Considering the magazine's national influence on not only the public but on the opinions of thousands of local and national sports journalists, Robin Miller of the Indianapolis Star warned me that I'd catch the blame for dealing a devastating blow to Indy's prestige.
Each side, the IRL and CART, claimed by now that I was biased in favor of the other. To me, and to my editors, that was confirmation of my neutrality. The only thing I was firmly against was the damage to an American institution, the Indianapolis 500.
At one point in the war, I wrote a Scorecard item headlined, "A Pox on Both Their Pits."
At another point, some IRL partisans cornered me in a hospitality tent at Indy for a heated debate.
"Surely you'll admit," an angry George supporter said, "that this race belongs to him."
"I'll admit no such thing," I said. "Tony owns the track. But the Indianapolis 500 belongs to the American people. They're the ones who made it."

The CART barons in 1998 took another step that would come back to haunt them. They took their organization public, selling $100 million worth of stock.
Roger Penske, arguably the best businessman among them -- and unquestionably the best racing businessman among them -- had his doubts. Wall Street loved cost-cutting, and its analysts would respond only to significant profits.
Racing, Penske knew, was the last business that could withstand tight, set budgets and cost-cutting. To win, racers had to spend, rolling the dice on technology, as needed.
But the CART barons as a whole had traditionally raced for profit. They banded together in strategic situations. But usually, each voted according to his own business interests.
Leigh Steinberg, the powerful NFL agent, mastered the art of negotiating with owners. He once reckoned the typical American sports franchise owner had already made a fortune in some other business by going against conventional wisdom, and sometimes even rational advice. So he was likely to apply that maverick, damn-the-torpedoes attitude to sports. That template translated well to the CART team owners.
And so the CART barons, against the historic tides of motor racing business, went for the quick $100 million in extra funding.
Beyond the public offering, CART's public image took a terrible hit in July of '98. During a race at Michigan, three spectators were killed and six more injured by flying debris from a wreck. To make PR matters worse, they restarted and completed the race after the tragedy.
Only nine months later, the IRL would suffer an almost-mirror disaster.

If there was a single year that sealed the decline of Indy car racing, it was 1999. It began with hope -- yes, again -- of reconciliation. But it ended as the most tragic year of the war.
Regularly now, CART was sending emissaries to George. Regularly, he wouldn't budge.
[+] EnlargeLeo  Mehl
Matt Campbell/AFP/Getty ImagesLeo Mehl had been known as one of the best men in motorsports to settle disputes, but he proved unable to do so as the executive director of the IRL between the factions of the open-wheel split.
CART had hamstrung itself for negotiating with George by going public. Now, merging the two organizations would mean dealing not just with the barons, but all the CART stockholders, to gain the complete control George wanted.
George, like his grandfather Tony Hulman -- and indeed like NASCAR's France dynasty -- didn't want partners.
Mehl, running the IRL operations day to day, had not become the reconciler many had hoped. He'd become such a hard-liner on behalf of Tony George that CART partisans began calling him "the man formerly known as Leo Mehl."
At Indy that May, Mehl was atypically animated as he told Robin Miller and me that if the CART teams came back to Indy and tried to compete in IRL-legal cars, "they'd get their doors blown off! Their DOORS blown off!"
Indy cars of course didn't have doors, but that was a universal racing term, and Mehl had been a universal racing man before he'd become an IRL man.

But that spring, there was a strong undercurrent that the most powerful mediator possible was emerging: NASCAR czar Bill France Jr.
France didn't deny it; he just said it would be "premature" for him to comment.
He had kept his public posture of neutrality, even though he recently had laughed on the phone to me as he confirmed that the Indy car war "sure hasn't hurt us any, has it?"
Fans who were weary of the Indy car schism were now helping to fill the grandstands at NASCAR races and increase NASCAR television ratings.
But now, the France-controlled track conglomerate International Speedway Corporation was in the process of taking over the group of tracks controlled by CART's Roger Penske: Michigan Speedway, the new California Speedway (in the Los Angeles market the France family had long coveted), North Carolina Speedway at Rockingham and Nazareth Speedway in Pennsylvania. All but Rockingham regularly hosted CART races.
It was in the best interests of both the France family and rival track owner Bruton Smith at Speedway Motorsports Inc. to make one tidy series of Indy car racing, if they were going to use it for additional racing revenue weekends at their primarily NASCAR tracks.
Meanwhile, engineers from CART's wealth of engine suppliers, Ford, Honda and Mercedes-Benz, were devising an offer to the IRL of a common engine formula that could lead toward technological compromise. If only they could get the IRL's sole engine supplier of the time, General Motors, to agree …
"There's no question that we can pull the Indy 500 and American open-wheel racing back together," Penske said, "but one man has to make that decision, and Tony is the guy."
But on May 1, 1999, George suffered a devastating distraction.

At Charlotte, in that year's last IRL race before the Indy 500, three spectators were killed and eight more injured -- again, as in the CART disaster at Michigan the year before, by flying tires and debris from a crash.
Crash
AP Photo/Larry LapkeAdrian Fernandez hit the wall at Michigan International Speedway in 1998, causing an untethered tire and suspension parts to fly into the crowd. Three fans were killed in the stands. A similar scene would unfold less than a year later in an IRL race.
Now both leagues had serious image problems with regard to fan safety, and they scrambled to harness the shrapnel inherent in crashes. Built with driver safety foremost in mind, Indy cars tended to disintegrate -- except for the central "tub," where the driver sat -- on impact, to dissipate energy.
Formula One, just that year, had mandated the tethering of wheels to chassis for just such incidents. And in May, before either CART or the IRL could revise their safety regulations, NASCAR -- where fan safety had always come first -- announced preemptive measures, tethering wheels and hoods to cars in case they broke off in wrecks.
Mehl, George and the IRL deliberated with caution, concerned that tethering might "make things worse," as Mehl worried, by unintended consequences -- such as wheels coming back into cockpits, or being sent with even greater force into grandstands by some slingshot effect.
Meanwhile, I wrote a column suggesting further safety measures on behalf of spectators, including higher protective "catch" fences with broader overhangs.
Never had a column of mine led to such an uproar.

"Hinton!" Chip Ganassi shouted at me from his hospitality tent as I walked by, at the St. Louis track where CART was running, on the day before the '99 Indy 500. "You know that race [Indy] is in trouble when the biggest story to come out of there this month is you."
He grinned.
As I walked up the pit road, I got applause from drivers, owners, crewmen … Mario Andretti waved me over to where he and Paul Newman were standing.
Newman stuck out his hand and said, "Welcome to the ranks of the unwanted."
Unwanted at Indy, he meant.
Of Tony George, Newman said, "It's damn near criminal, what he's done."
He didn't mean to me. He meant to the American people, by devastating the Indianapolis 500.
But Ganassi was right about this incident, in the fourth spring of the Indy car war. It was a sad state of affairs when the ongoing story out of Indy, for much of May, had been the attempted ban of one sportswriter from covering the race.

On the evening of the spectator deaths at Charlotte, I was in Fontana, Calif., covering a NASCAR race. When news of the tragedy came, my editors put together a plan.
The magazine's news bureau was retaining two local reporters in Charlotte, and SI staff reporters were working the phones from New York. I was to stay put -- no time to fly cross-country. I would receive files of information from the reporters in New York and Charlotte, and would do additional reporting myself.
Then I would write a column about the spectator deaths in both CART and the IRL in the past nine months, and explore ways to prevent such tragedies.
Writing from a hotel room in Ontario, Calif., I had absolutely no say in either the photo selection or the headline on that column. That was all done by editors in New York.
Yet it was the headline, "Fatal Attractions," and the photograph, of a security guard standing over a body covered by a bloody sheet in the grandstands, that upset George, I was told later.
The week after that column came out, the editor of Sports Illustrated received a letter stating I would be denied press credentials for the Indy 500. Editors could send any other staffer, just not me -- strange, in that George's primary complaints, about the photo and the headline, were with the magazine as a whole, more than with the text I'd written.
I could buy a ticket, George announced to the public, but I would forever be denied media credentials, and access to media facilities, for the Indianapolis 500, the Brickyard 400 and all other events in the future at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
(A NASCAR publicist phoned immediately to promise privately that I could get into the Brickyard 400, accompanied by NASCAR officials, if push came to shove the following August.)
Lowes Motor Speedway
AP Photo/Rusty BurroughsThe collision between the cars of Stan Wattles and John Paul Jr. set off a chain of events that killed three spectators and injured eight more at Lowe's Motor Speedway in 1999.
The story of the ban went out worldwide on the wire services. Immediately, the Chicago Tribune ordered its motorsports writer to turn in his credentials and leave Indy. The Los Angeles Times held its reporter back, stopping him just before he boarded a flight at LAX. Quickly, many of the nation's major daily newspapers followed suit, informing Indy publicists they would not staff the race if the Sports Illustrated motorsports writer were not issued credentials.
Tribune sports editor John Cherwa, who'd led the newspaper protest, announced that it was not a matter of supporting Sports Illustrated, or me, per se. It was, he pointed out, a censorship issue -- a serious precedent of media organizations being told who they could and couldn't send to cover an event.
There was bitter backlash among IRL loyalist fans. Internet threads sprang up like wildfire, spreading rumors as outlandish as that I had personally taken the pictures of the sheet-covered bodies at Charlotte. In fact, the photos were taken and transmitted by The Associated Press.
One SI writer, driving through the Italian countryside on his honeymoon, was listening to the news on the radio. He didn't understand much Italian, and made out only "Indianapolis 500," "Sports Illustrated" and "Ed Hinton" -- and thought I might have been killed in some freak pit accident there.
Purdue University's public radio station phoned me at home for a lengthy interview, which I thought would be broadcast only in Indiana -- until one evening an SI writer in New York phoned me in Atlanta and said, "Quick! Turn on NPR! You're on 'All Things Considered' [a national in-depth news program]."
This would all have been hilarious if it weren't so terribly sad. For decades, news out of Indianapolis in May had gone worldwide about drivers and memorable races and the enormous happening that was the 500.
Now, Chip Ganassi was right: This was the most interesting story the media could find about Indy this time?
That told you just how disemboweled of prestige, and of stars, the grand old race was.
Finally, faced with the prospect of a thinning media center on race day, George relented and reinstated me. The great irony was that the race was now so weakened I hadn't originally planned to cover it. I'd planned to go to Charlotte for the 600 or Monaco for the F1 race. But back in March, as an afterthought, just in case, I'd asked editors to put in a request for Indy credentials -- and that's what gave George something to deny, and therefore detonate the whole hoopla.
Now, with the reinstatement, the editors in New York told me I had to go to Indy, if only to acknowledge the newspapers' anti-censorship movement.
There was no track activity the day I returned, so the media center was almost deserted.
One old friend, a veteran West Coast writer, looked up from his keyboard at me and said "You sonofabitch."
I smiled. With this guy, there was always a punch line.
"We were all getting ready to leave this place and never come back," he growled. "We were done covering this dog. Now you get reinstated, and we have to go on covering it. You … son … of … a … bitch!"
Indy Safety Fence
Guy Rhodes/US PresswireIn the years following the deaths of spectators at two races, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and other tracks raised catch fences and widened the fence overhangs while the IRL and other leagues worked on the problem of flying debris from cars.
A little later I was walking out toward Gasoline Alley when a high-ranking IRL official came flying up on a motor scooter and screeched to a halt.
He told me he'd advised against the ban, and then he told me the essence of the reason for it.
"Tony knew what was under those sheets," he said. "That's what had him so upset."
He revved the scooter and rode away.
The next day, the IRL announced measures to tether wheels and suspension pieces to the chassis of the cars. And, in ensuing months and years, tracks would continually heighten safety fences and broaden the overhangs.
All told, the IRL did everything I had suggested, and more, in the column that got me banned.
It all went back to that old NASCAR philosophy that killing and injuring your paying customers just isn't good business.

What promised to be the biggest, broadest-based summit meeting of the war was scheduled for that September, in the Detroit offices of Herb Fishel, General Motors' racing director. GM, primary engine supplier for the IRL, had agreed to discuss the proposal of the CART suppliers, Ford, Honda and Mercedes-Benz, for a common engine formula that could begin technological reconciliation of the two leagues.
So here were chieftains from all these manufacturers, and the chief mediator present was Bill France Jr., chairman of NASCAR.
Only one mogul failed to show: Tony George.
The one man who could make the decision for reconciliation, as Roger Penske had said, didn't even come to listen.
When I heard George had skipped the meeting, I phoned France at home in Daytona Beach to ask how he felt about being stood up.
France was so nonchalant you could almost hear him shrugging on the phone. He didn't sound very disappointed.
"He had other commitments," France said, excusing George matter-of-factly.
That was a board meeting at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. How in the world, I wondered, could any meeting at Indy be more important than the Detroit meeting that could have affected Indy for years, even decades, to come?
But there were rumblings that meetings at Indy were becoming more and more vital, in that Tony George's three sisters, all heiresses to the Hulman & Co. fortune, were growing more and more uneasy about the hemorrhaging of family wealth into Tony's IRL adventure.

For the first 20 years of its existence, CART had suffered only two driver fatalities at events it sanctioned. The '99 season alone would bring two more.
In September, rookie Gonzalo Rodriguez, driving for Roger Penske, was killed at Monterey, Calif., when his car slammed head-on into a wall and vaulted over it.
The death devastated his senior teammate, American household name Al Unser Jr. "That kid … that really got me … such a good kid, such a good teammate," Unser said to me, voice cracking, eyes welling, in Miami Beach later on.
Coincidentally or not, Unser's career ebbed from there, and never flowed to the heights again. His run as the American banner-carrier for CART was over.
CART had prided itself on safety technology for its drivers. But something had gone terribly wrong this time. Usually, forward head-whip was lessened when CART drivers' heads hit the steering wheels, well-protected by their full-face helmets. This time, the nature of the impact had sent Rodriguez's head whipping out over the steering wheel.
Dr. Steve Olvey, CART's attending physician at the scene, told me Rodriguez died of basilar skull fracture, a syndrome that would later plague NASCAR, in which cracking bone in the back of the skull cut vital arteries and damaged the brain stem in one terrible motion, due to violent whipping of the head.
Rodriguez had been barely known. But the popular, mischievous, effervescent young Canadian Greg Moore was a skyrocketing star in CART. His style and personality amounted to a pillar of CART's hopes for the future.
But on Halloween weekend at California Speedway, a bizarre series of events unfolded. First, Moore, riding a motor scooter through the paddock, collided with a car that backed unexpectedly out of a parking space. Moore suffered a broken wrist and was unable to qualify.
Greg  Moore
Scott Nelson/AFP/Getty ImagesThe death of Greg Moore at California Speedway on Halloween 1999 was a devastating blow to his team and to CART. Moore's death was the second in only two months for the series, coming on the heels of Gonzalo Rodriguez being killed at Monterey.
Doctors cleared him to start CART's season finale that Sunday, but he had to start at the back of the field. Back there, his car underwent horrific buffeting from turbulence, then broke loose, skated across the infield grass and rolled wildly out of control, ripping up the turf.
Moore was killed.
You could hear the terrible strain and sorrow in Olvey's voice as he made the official announcement. In less than two months, CART's all-time fatality toll had doubled.
Enough of the pretty infield grass that let the car skate wildly, a heartsick and outraged Mario Andretti said. The infield areas inside the corners must be paved, to slow down the slides.
"You want a pretty green color for television?" Andretti growled to me. "Then paint the goddamned asphalt green!"

With reconciliation still out of reach, the France-controlled ISC -- taking control of the Penske tracks -- would simply toss CART out of Michigan and California and instead run IRL races -- none of which drew more than smatterings of spectators to the grandstands.
Now everybody was losing, even the track-owning arm of the France/NASCAR empire.
That effectively finished off CART racing on high-speed ovals in the U.S. One more CART attempt at a big track, at Texas in 2001, would be canceled, leading to a lawsuit that would drive another nail into CART's rapidly sealing coffin.

Coming Thursday: Part IV of The Damage Done: Hell Of A Vision

Ed Hinton is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn.com.

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Austin, Texas to host US Formula One Grand Prix in 2012

Spectators wait at the last US Grand Prix in 2007 ... but in 2012 the action will return to the country © Sutton Images

Speculation over the future of Formula One in the United States has been ended with news that the sport's rights holders have signed a ten-year deal with promoters to host a US Grand Prix at a purpose-built track in Austin, Texas from 2012.
Formula One World Championship Limited and Formula One Administration Limited, who together own the rights to F1, signed a contract with American promoter Full Throttle Productions to stage the race.
"For the first time in the history of Formula One in the United States, a world-class facility will be purpose-built to host the event," Bernie Ecclestone said. "It was 30 years ago that the United States Grand Prix was last held on a purpose-built permanent road course circuit in Watkins Glen, which enjoyed great success.
"Since then, Formula One has been hosted by Long Beach, Las Vegas, Detroit, Dallas and Phoenix all on temporary street circuits. Indianapolis joined the ranks of host cities in 2000 when they added a road course inside the famed oval. Lewis Hamilton won the last Formula 1 United States Grand Prix™ in 2007, signalling the end to eight years at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This however, will be the first time a facility is constructed from the ground up specifically for Formula One in the US."
"We have been diligently working together for several years to bring this great event to Austin, the State of Texas and back to the United States," said Tavo Hellmund, managing partner of Full Throttle Productions. "All parties involved have a great amount of trust and confidence in each other and are committed to establishing the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas as a prestigious global event."
Speaking to ESPN, Hellmund said the track and grandstand would be built "within 10 miles" of the Austin airport and would be at least three miles long. He declined to release further details, including the total cost, but he did say the facility would be privately financed.
Austin, with a metro area population of about 1.7 million, is a three-hour drive or less from Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Hellmund said Austin had to compete with interest for the race "from New York to Miami".
He also said F1 officials who visited Austin were impressed with the city and the plan to build a Grand Prix-specific course "You don't put Austin in same sentence as Monaco or Singapore, but everyone was blown away. Austin has grown up ... I think they fell in love with the city. It isn't a one-trick pony where we're going to set up a street course."
Texas Comptroller Susan Combs said in a statement: "The visibility and prestige of this event will spotlight our state on an international stage."
Indianapolis Motor Speedway spokesman Fred Nation wished Austin all the best: "We are proud to have hosted the US GP and to have had some of the largest F1 crowds.
"Since 2007 we have been asked many times about having F1 return and our answer has been the same each time: 'If the business deal is right, they are welcome back'. If such a deal is in place in Austin, we wish both the city and F1 success." 

© ESPN EMEA Ltd.


lunes, mayo 24, 2010

Indianapolis 500: Sebastian Saavedra remains in Indianapolis 500 field despite late Bump Day crash

Sebastian Saavedra
AP Photo/Tom Strattman Indy 500 rookie Sebastian Saavedra made his way into the race despite crashing during practice on Sunday.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Sebastian Saavedra of Colombia was taken to a hospital for X-rays on his back after crashing during Sunday's qualifying session for the Indianapolis 500.
Saavedra, a rookie, spun coming out of the first turn and slammed into the wall before skidding to a stop between the first and second turns. He was released from the infield medical center but later returned.
Saavedra was the slowest of the 33 qualifiers at 223.634 mph and would have been the next car bumped from the starting grid. He did not have a backup car and it was unlikely he would be able to make another qualifying run in the final hour.
But late in Bump Day, with pressure mounting, Paul Tracy and Jay Howard pulled their earlier qualifying times and went back out on the track to improve their standing. The move backfired for both drivers, knocking them out of the race and assuring Saavedra remained in the field.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. 

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jueves, mayo 20, 2010

CART said it had the "cars and stars" of Indy racing while the IRL had Indy itself -- it went well for neither in 1996

May '96 memorable for wrong reasons


Hinton By Ed Hinton ESPN.com
Editor's note: ESPN.com senior writer Ed Hinton has spent more than 35 years covering motorsports across the globe for entities including Sports Illustrated, The National Sports Daily, Tribune Newspapers and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This four-part series, The Damage Done, is his memoir of what he saw and reported leading up to the American open-wheel civil war and the consequences it wrought. This is Part II, Getting It Wrong.

Tony StewartMatthew Stockman/AllsportTony Stewart, right, started the 1996 Indy 500 from the pole. There was a rival open-wheel race that day, one in Michigan billed as having the "stars and cars." In Charlotte, rising star Dale Jarrett beat superstar Dale Earnhardt in the Coca-Cola 600.
Before I'd left for that inaugural Indy Racing League race at Disney World, militant CART team owner Carl Haas had asked rhetorically, "Why should a track promoter take control over a whole series?"
That had been CART's attitude toward Tony George all along, that he was just another track promoter.
In Florida, George replied that, "As president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, I am obligated to a leadership role in this sport and its directions."
With this sense of noblesse oblige, George took his stand. The Disney Indy 200 played to a sellout crowd of about 51,000 that Saturday, Jan. 27, 1996.
On the surface, the race went off as a surprising success. But on the track, there remained questions as Tony Stewart lost a late duel to another 24-year-old American rookie, the far less known Buzz Calkins, for the win.
Those were the only two drivers who finished on the lead lap.
Only 20 cars had been entered, with almost no visible sponsorship. None of that boded well for Tony George's edict from the year before that 25 starting spots in the Indy 500 would be reserved for teams with IRL points.
The CART teams would stay away from the next IRL race, at Phoenix in March, further forfeiting any IRL points that would count toward Indy 500 starting spots.
It didn't matter, they maintained, because they weren't coming to Indy anyway. And they wouldn't just sit idle, either. They would retaliate mightily, running their own alternative race, the U.S. 500, at Michigan International Speedway on the same day as Indy.
They would bill their event as featuring "the stars and cars of Indy," while Indy itself hosted mostly also-rans, malcontents, backmarkers and one poster boy.

A few weeks later, on Friday before Daytona 500 Sunday, my message light was blinking when I returned to my hotel room. It was from one of the higher-up editors at Sports Illustrated. Please call. Urgent.
The editors had met in New York that day and discussed our upcoming Daytona coverage, and they had a question for me.
With the Indianapolis 500 sure to be fragmented in May, and all of NASCAR's stars in place for its showcase race, wasn't there a case to be made that the Daytona 500 was emerging as America's premier motorsports event?
Sadly -- sad because the Indy 500 had been such a national and international institution for so long -- I concurred. There was no denying it.
In the following week's issue, for the first time ever, we would treat the Daytona 500 as America's biggest automobile race.
On race day morning, Richard Petty opined to me that not only was the Daytona 500 a bigger race now, but that NASCAR actually would be welcomed by the public if it took over the Indianapolis 500.

Richard  Petty ... they could change it [the Indy 500] into a NASCAR race and I don't believe the American public would blink an eye. They wouldn't be upset at all. In fact, they'd probably be more enthusiastic now, because it would go back to being an all-American sports spectacular.
-- Richard Petty
"If we didn't have a conflicting date [the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte], they could change it [the Indy 500] into a NASCAR race," Petty said, "and I don't believe the American public would blink an eye. They wouldn't be upset at all.
"In fact, they'd probably be more enthusiastic now, because it would go back to being an all-American sports spectacular."
Indeed, fan discontent with the dominance of Indy by imported drivers was by now a groundswell.
Tony George was now rushing, against the odds, to remedy that.

As April of '96 passed, so did any chance of reconciliation. The CART boycott of Indy was on.
One side said Indy couldn't do without its prime league of cars and drivers. The other said the CART series couldn't do without cornerstone Indy.
Ultimately, tragically, both sides would prove ruinously right.
I phoned some of the CART barons to ask if they really, truly thought the world's greatest race could be brought down.
One, Chip Ganassi, put it this way.
"I'm sitting in my office in Pittsburgh, OK? And I'm looking out the windows, to where the world's largest steel manufacturer used to be. It isn't there anymore. The point is, one management change here, one strategy change there, and the greatest of a lot of things in the world aren't the greatest anymore."

For open-wheel racing's battle of Gettysburg, in May of '96, the IRL teams were a motley, ragtag army, underfunded, undermanned, under-equipped, except for billionaire John Menard's personally financed team featuring the sudden star Tony Stewart and the veteran American Scott Brayton.
But the IRL held the strategic high ground, the storied Speedway itself, albeit a rather stark, barren, desolate sight to behold without the glitz, the opulence, the high technology and the lavish entertainment of CART.
The CART teams were massing up in Michigan, preparing for their alternative U.S. 500, practically giving away seats to fill the grandstands to look good on television, and taking pot shots via the media at what they deemed the makeshift goings-on at Indianapolis.
They billed themselves as "the stars and cars of Indy" in promoting the U.S. 500.
Down at Indy, A.J. Foyt responded that "It's Indianapolis that makes the stars, not the drivers who make Indianapolis."
Robin Miller, the nationally renowned -- or notorious, depending on your point of view -- veteran motorsports columnist for the Indianapolis Star, had been scathing in his commentaries on the split.
It was Miller who articulated the gravest truth for both sides.
"All the stars and cars," he said to me in conversation, "are now in NASCAR."

On the morning of May 17, Tony Stewart prepared to leave his Indianapolis apartment and drive to the track. This would be another tough day, he knew -- the media had mobbed him all month as the quintessential example of what Tony George was trying to accomplish with the IRL.
Racing on his own since age 19 when his parents ran out of money for him, Stewart had worked day jobs -- in a machine shop, or driving a tow truck -- and raced at night in sprint cars.
Often he would drive the tow truck down Georgetown Road, behind the frontstretch grandstands at the Speedway, and wonder what it must be like to go 200 mph there.
Now he knew -- and he also knew what it was like when you got out of the car: minicams and microphones everywhere, the same shouted questions over and over about the split, about his sudden stardom, about whether he could handle it all …
Well, at least his veteran teammate, Brayton, had taken a lot of the heat off Stewart the previous weekend.
After Brayton won the pole, the genial Michigander, at 37 the most experienced driver in the entire makeshift field, assumed the role of senior statesman, naturally and well, for the IRL.
"I am an Indy car driver," Brayton emphasized. "That means I race at Indy." His loyalist words resounded up to Michigan, his home state, yet the staging area for the CART rebellion.
Stewart had qualified second, in the middle of the front row for the race, but Indy tradition channeled the brunt of media attention to the pole sitter going into the race.
Now, about to walk out of his apartment, Stewart reached to turn off his TV set -- and stopped.
He saw, on the screen, one of the Menard cars crashing horrifically. In a split second, the car snapped around backward in Turn 2, and pancaked the wall on its left side.
Stewart thought at first it was a replay from an earlier incident in that Friday morning's practice. Then he realized it was live -- or at least an immediate replay from a crash that had just happened.
He hurried off to the track. There he found his team's garages all but deserted, learned that Brayton had been taken to Methodist Hospital and was told to go to the Menard shop in Indianapolis.

Scott BraytonAP Photo/Bob EakinsScott Brayton's car snapped around in Turn 2 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on May 17, 1996, and the pole sitter for the Indy 500 was killed. The IRL had lost one of its best spokesmen and respected drivers in the blink of an eye.
The dour Dutchman Arie Luyendyk had also chosen to stick with Indy, where he had won the 500 of 1990 with owner Doug Shierson's CART team.
When Luyendyk heard Scott Brayton was dead, "I didn't think, 'He died doing what he wanted to do,'" he told Miller and me. "I didn't think, 'He would want us to go on,' and I didn't think, 'He's in a better place.'
"I thought, 'God damn it!'"
The sudden death of Brayton cast a pall all the way up to Michigan, where the CART tongues went silent, stunned, heartsick. They were just as grief-stricken as their IRL foes.
There was something of a truce on May 22, as members of the warring parties met in Coldwater, Mich., for Brayton's funeral.
For all the CART criticism of the ragtag Indy effort, nobody questioned Menard's well-prepared cars, which were every bit as safe as that year's CART cars, or Brayton's ability. Something had just broken on the car, the car had snapped around and Brayton's helmet had hit the concrete wall.
What they did question was that the IRL put less restriction on turbocharger "boost," heightening horsepower, and that Indy had recently been repaved -- both guaranteeing higher speeds for a field of drivers not nearly as experienced as those in CART.
Up in Michigan, Mario Andretti called the Indy situation "a kind of Russian roulette."
If Stewart had felt bewildered and overwhelmed with all the attention before, the storm surge increased exponentially. The poster boy was now also the pole sitter, and, inextricably, the face and voice of his dead teammate.
TV crews encircled the Menard racing shop, and Stewart had to be spirited in and out, in an inconspicuous vehicle, through a service entrance. Through this ordeal, Stewart became more and more bewildered, disappointed, exasperated and confused about the media.
Those scars have never gone away entirely. To this day, when media colleagues ask why Stewart can be so impatient and indignant with us, I tell them about that week in '96 at Indy.
On Saturday morning, a handful of media people were invited to the Menard shop. I managed to corner Stewart one-on-one, to ask him the very questions he didn't want to hear, but the ones my job demanded that I ask -- about the enormity of his situation, the shock of the death of his teammate and his own fears.
For the first of many times, I saw how his brown eyes could blaze with anger and disgust.
"I'm a race driver," he said. "I don't have time to dwell on things like that."
He turned and walked away.

On Saturday night, the Indianapolis Star sent a reporting team down to the corner of 16th Street and Georgetown Road, by the Speedway, where historically Indy 500 eves had been mob scenes, wild as any Mardi Gras. Now the crowd was sparse.
Scalpers were in a panic, and the price of tickets with a face value of $125, which in recent years had brought as much as $1,000 apiece, plunged to $40.
One savvy scalper, a veteran of wheeling and dealing at The Masters, the World Series, the NCAA Final Four and Indy in the glory days, shouted to a Star reporter through the drizzle: "This race is over, and it ain't never comin' back!"
He was partly prophetic. The race wasn't over, finished, per se. But it would never come back to where it had been, at the pinnacle of the motor racing world.

"It's a crucial day for us," Tony George said on race-day morning, Gettysburg day, in Indiana, with the opposing legions camped in Michigan. "But I doubt that a clear winner will be declared at the end of the day."
George had admonished his drivers to spread out and be cautious for the start of the race. The last thing the IRL needed, under the harsh scrutiny of the CART critics, was to fulfill their predictions of a disaster at the Indy start.
They indeed spread out to take the green flag, and rookie Stewart streaked far out front, turning laps at a race-record 232 mph-plus, then breaking his own records lap after lap … until a little device for controlling turbocharger pressure, called a "pop-off valve," literally popped off permanently. It broke.
Chased by a media mob back to his garage, beleaguered with questions about what had happened, Stewart kept repeating, "ask USAC … ask USAC … ask USAC …"
The United State Auto Club was still the sanctioning body, with the IRL considered a new branch. USAC officials had handed out, at random, the pop-off valves that were all supposed to be equal. There was no answer as to why Stewart's valve broke.
As the most crucial day of the war wore on, Indy became more and more deflated. The pall of Brayton's death was still palpable, and now the great young hope for public-relations vindication, Stewart, was out of the race …
But within minutes the tide of battle turned. In the media center, some monitors were tuned to the start of the U.S. 500. Suddenly the media center exploded in shouts of disbelief, and I looked up to see a massive pileup on the start … at Michigan.
U.S. 500 Crash
AP Photo/Roger HartThe big crash at the start was supposed to happen down in Indianapolis on May 26, 1996. Instead, the "stars" of the CART series couldn't keep their noses clean in the U.S. 500.
The car of CART's pole sitter, Jimmy Vasser, somehow wiggled and collided with that of the other front-row starter, Adrian Fernandez, and a 12-car melee ensued.
CART red-flagged its race while the drivers involved, including Vasser, went to their backup cars. That was some Mulligan they'd given themselves -- crash, and then throw out that start and do it over. Vasser, in his backup car, won the race.
But as Indy droned on, nameless, colorless, sad, there remained, as George had predicted, no clear winner. Both sides were losing, with a global audience.
There was a dramatic ending, but only if you were a close follower of Indy car racing. To general populations, the name of the winner of the 80th Indianapolis 500, did not resonate: Buddy Lazier.
Lazier drove with 25 fractures in his backbone, an injury suffered in a crash in the second-ever IRL race, at Phoenix that March. The most touching sight of the Indy 500 had come under a late caution, after Lazier had taken the lead with eight laps to go under green. Cruising up front under yellow, he agonizingly stretched his arms outside the cockpit and shifted his weight in the seat, trying to ease the excruciating pain.
Dramatic as the scene was, Foyt's formula for Indy stardom would fail Lazier, whose fame would be fleeting.
But CART, more than Indy, finished the day embarrassed.
"What they predicted would happen to us," said Lazier's car owner, Ron Hemelgarn, "happened to them."
Tony George left the grounds signing autographs for flocks of loyalist fans who thanked and congratulated him for what he was doing.
The next morning, I saw him on the steps of the Speedway Motel on the grounds.
"Well," I said, "you held your ground."
"I was wondering when we were going to convince you," he said.
But as he'd predicted, there was no winner, and I was convinced only that more devastation for both sides lay ahead.
The race technically had been a sellout, on the sheer momentum of Indy's history, and the widespread hope that the sides would reconcile in time for the race.
"The scalping market crashed," I said.
"I don't care about the scalpers," George said.
But it meant that his sellout had been soft -- face-value tickets were no longer precious. If you could buy a prime seat for $40 on race day, why pay $125 in advance? The erosion had begun for Indy.
And never again would CART attempt to run a race directly opposite Indianapolis.

George took three major steps for the 1997 season that were sure to widen the chasm between his IRL and the CART barons -- and one huge step the motor racing world hoped might help close the schism.
He changed the car and engine package entirely -- part of his strategy for lowering costs -- and he gained strong allies among the owners of NASCAR tracks. The technical changes were sure to push CART farther away. The formulas were now completely incompatible.
The new IRL venues at tracks such as Las Vegas, Texas, Charlotte and New Hampshire gave it a stronger season tour that assured the war would continue.
But on the other hand, George hired Leo Mehl to run the IRL for him, as executive director.
I knew of no one in the motor racing world, from short tracks to Formula One, who didn't like Mehl, recently retired as Goodyear's director of worldwide racing.
Mehl was, purely and simply, the world's best and most effective auto racing diplomat.
"He's a dear man, bless him," F1 team owner Frank Williams once said to me, largely reflecting the opinions of owners and drivers worldwide, from Dale Earnhardt to A.J. Foyt to Ayrton Senna, of the man who supplied the vital transfer of all that horsepower to pavement.
A chemical engineer by training, Mehl had gone to work for Goodyear as a tire compounder in 1962 and worked his way up the ladder until he was chief manager, spokesman and negotiator for all of the company's racing efforts.
He was equally at home on any pit lane, from Indy to Le Mans, Daytona to Monaco -- or from Eldora Speedway in the Ohio dirt to Volusia County Speedway in the Florida hinterlands.
But this time, Mehl walked into a schism that was getting dangerously close to irreparable.
The IRL would have its own, very different, cars and engines for its second year, replacing what had amounted to leftover CART cars in '96.
Though new, the IRL package would be more primitive. It amounted, Carl Haas complained to me on the phone, to "going back to shade-tree mechanics."
The engines would be of stock configuration, and normally aspirated -- that is, non-turbocharged. The cars would look more like Formula One cars of the time, featuring "ram boxes" -- those high tunnels with the openings above the driver's head -- to feed air to the atmospheric engines.
The cars were clunky and unsafe, and the regressive engine formula would be unreliable, CART owners and drivers said. CART's top two American drivers of the time, Al Unser Jr. and Michael Andretti, wouldn't even test the things.
So the two paths diverged even more on technology. There simply was no middle ground between the car and engine formulas of '97.

The new IRL package was just fine with George's Southern allies. To them, high-tech was uppity. The feeling was deep-seated. Once, I'd even heard Big Bill France, the NASCAR founder, advise one of Tony Hulman's lieutenants, "You all need to change to stock-block engines."
Primitive was good, in the Southern mindset.
Humpy Wheeler
Chris Trotman/Getty Images for NASCARHumpy Wheeler was more than eager to allow the IRL on his track outside Charlotte as a way to help pour money into the facility.
George's intentions and his cars were oriented toward oval tracks -- and ovals, the Southern tycoons had aplenty. All wanted more events annually for their facilities.
"These tracks wake up every morning, 365 days a year, and devour money," H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, president of the Bruton Smith-chaired Speedway Motorsports Inc., told me in '97, in explaining why SMI was forming a broad and close alliance with the IRL.
The idea was to make the tracks work to pay for themselves -- that is, host more events and sell more tickets and TV rights -- as many weekends of the year as possible. Two NASCAR Cup races a year weren't enough for the cash-insatiable track moguls.
But by no means did the track owners want Indy car racing to overshadow their NASCAR events. They wanted the IRL mainly as a nice, novel support series to open each track's gates once or twice more a year.
Smith's intermediate-size tracks were especially suited to IRL cars -- fast, but not too fast. In the France-family controlled International Speedway Corp., the two crown-jewel tracks, Daytona and Talladega, were far too fast for Indy cars.
By 1997 for the '98 season, Tony George's series had a secured a solid circuit that included the NASCAR-oriented tracks at Atlanta, Charlotte, New Hampshire, Las Vegas and Texas, in addition to George's own Indy, and then-independent Phoenix International Raceway and Pikes Peak International Raceway in Colorado.
CART would continue on its largely road and street racing circuit in the U.S. and Canada, but with two major 2-mile tracks, Michigan and California Speedway, both owned by CART stalwart Roger Penske at the time.
By now the Indy car fan base, already confused as to who was racing in which league, had divided and bitterly polarized. And some were turning to the more harmonious, solidly unified NASCAR, bulging with stars and cars they could count on seeing every Sunday.

Coming next Tuesday: Part III of The Damage Done: Digging In

Ed Hinton is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn.com.

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