When the split was on, there was an interview in Racer magazine with Mario Andretti. On the topic of Formula One drivers, he was asked why there weren't drivers coming from IRL to F1. He answered, "well, there's a reason they're in the IRL."
From a Brazilian perspective: CART was HUGE here in mid to late 90s. Races were broadcasted live by SBT, the second largest TV channel - and it happened at a time when sunday afternoon TV had a big impact on the Brazilian cultural zeitgeist, with the two main channels pushing the envelope harder and harder for ratings. It was fair to say that it rivaled F1 among the Brazilian public in the first years of the split, despite the fact that they couldn't call it "Indy" anymore and came up with the completely made-up name "Fórmula Mundial" (something like "Formula World"). It was a huge draw for Brazilian fans with Emerson Fittipaldi coming from two Indy 500 wins, a lot of great Brazilian drivers (de Ferran, Gugelmin, C. Fittipaldi, Castroneves, Kanaan, Ribeiro and our hero Roberto Moreno) and very good racing, especially after the death of Ayrton Senna. I remember the commentators even talking about rumours of Barrichello joining CART. I believe Indy would never make it this big in Europe, regardless of the split, but had serious potential to establish itself in other markets like it did in Brazil for five or six years. The casual fans of the Senna era lost interest in motorsport. Hardcore fans eventually shifted their attention back to F1 with Rubens moving to Ferrari, but the deterioration of CART caused by the split was also a huge factor, especially not having the Indy 500 and losing Penske (along with de Ferran and Castroneves) to IRL. Live broadcasts were interrupted by 2000, and SBT began airing taped races around midnight, until their contract ended. The Bandeirantes channel (which was the first to televise Indycar in Brazil, before the split) picked up the rights for IRL since then, but their reach is way smaller and it was never the same. Perhaps if Indy had avoided the split, there would be enough pull to bring top F1 drivers after they retired from European racing, like it did with Fittipaldi and Mansell, and bring in some serious new talent on their prime, like the days when they could have peak Zanardi, Montoya, de Ferran and Moore on the same grid.
I don't know how much I buy the story about CART's popularity in Brazil. There were a lot of successful Brazilian drivers in the series, so when they finally attempted a race in Brazil, it was hyped to the skies, here in the US we were fed with a lot of talk about how big the race would be, and it turned out to be a flop. What did it run, two years? I watched it on TV. We'd always get the same story from CART, its fans, promoters, team owners and the TV announcers how popular CART was overseas, but except for Canada and for a few years in Australia, every time IndyCar has gone overseas it's been a failure. Some day we have to get our heads out of our asses and just admit that when it comes to this type of racing, everywhere it the world outside of the US, it's Formula One or nothing. People just aren't interested. I've been hearing this stuff about IndyCar's overseas popularity for 50 years and have never seen one bit of evidence that such popularity exists.
Another aspect where, in the early years, the IRL differed from CART was with the engine design: CART was with turbocharging; while Tony George's IRL went with what he defined as the low-cost and simplistic approach with a naturally aspirated engine by Oldsmobile. Fast-forward to 2012: The engines are turbocharged powered. So, the NTT IndyCar series became [what some would consider] version 2 of CART.
Some of my favourite memories as a kid was watching Schumacher vs. Alonso in the morning and Tracy vs. Bourdais in the afternoon. My dad was a CART fan and often talked about the split. I grew up watching Champ Car and I remember the reunification. It's flat out sad that it's practically back to where it started with a fraction of the original popularity and teams. I was always a Team Forsythe fan, and their livery was iconic!
CART had great cars, great tracks, and great drivers. IndyCar has an ancient spec chassis, interchangeable drivers named Scott, and Nashville. Still, since it's a series almost driven to death by selfishness, short-sightedness, and a hurty feelings man child, it's amazing it still exists.
The problem with American open wheel racing has always been the team owners and their different perspectives on what the sport is. The split was simply a manifestation of what has always been the real problem that being that it tries to be two things at once. At times it's good. Indycar is at home both on the streets of Long Beach and in an Iowa cornfield. But it is precisely that struggle between glitz and glamour and hard working oily hands engineering that is the issue. If you want glam and tech you watch F1. If you want to see a few good ol boys put together a big V8 while downing a few drinks you watch NASCAR. Indycar however has always had people on both sides of that spectrum trying to call the shots and in the end it ends up being one big compromise. In example it's harder to get a new car and rules changed in Indycar than F1 something that is completely confounding considering the leadership structures. I like Indycar but unless it finds a way to truly please everyone all around it will continue on as is.
You're spot-on calling how Indycar struggles to find a cohesive identity, but imho the fanbase is also pretty uninviting for how jaded and opinionated it is. You get people putting it down for having just two engine makes, not realizing that it's a miracle one of them hasn't called it quits, and that the series has pretty decent parity without using outright BoP.
The real split came when the rich sports car dudes started to come into IndyCar in the 1960s. They were from a different social class from the traditional IndyCar world. Think Lance Georg Wilhelm Detlev Graf Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow vs. AJ Watson. One class was the international, beautiful people jet set, and the other was American farm boy mechanics. But to the fury of the jet set crew, most American race fans ignored the sports car world and preferred the dirt & asphalt oval racing championships that culminated every year at Indy. The big money was in IndyCar racing, so the sports car guys, failing to put their own sport over, took over IndyCar, destroyed the native American sport and replaced it with a watered down version of what prevailed in the Europe they preferred to their own country. The biggest effort to make sports car racing major league in the US was the Can-Am series, but when that went belly-up they moved into IndyCar and, with their greater wealth and higher social connections (important in gaining sponsorships) made it their sandbox and drove out all the people who made IndyCar the most popular motor sport in the US. And since that time, IndyCar had a slow but inevitable decline until NASCAR, which was a flea speck compared to Indianapolis as recently as the early 70s, far surpassed IndyCar, mainly by picking up all the fans that IndyCar dropve away and rejected as "not worthy".
I know a few people who were ardent IndyCar fans up until the demise of CART/ChampCar. They're still motorsport fans, but primarily IMSA/WEC and F1. The sport lost a lot of fans over the split and talent was diluted. And you're absolutely correct who the real winners in this are. I miss the heyday when you had Lola, Reynard, Swift, and Eagle chassis, along with Mercedes, Ford, Honda, and Toyota motors all competing at the same time. IndyCar, while it looks similar to CART is a lackluster imitation product.
None of what you see today is because of the 1996 stuff. The split had long been a fact prior to 1996, going back to 1979 or so. I'm not sure why your friends REALLY don't go now, but it's not something that happened 26 (or 44) years ago.
CART was a mainstream sport. In western Canada at the time, everyone knew it as a legit top sport. Even if they weren't fans, they knew it was there. That isn't true anymore.
Yeah, no recognizable sponsorship, spec cars that are incredibly dated, and a lack of the raw speed that CART had has really taken the series down several notches. It feels more like IRL with better drivers than CART.
I was a big Indycar fan from the late 60s as well as Formula 1. Have not seen an Indy race since the split, knew none of the drivers or teams. By the time they made peace I was long gone.
@@LoganHunter82The drivers who were in the IRL were a third or fourth tier roster of racing drivers at best. The current drivers in Indycar are almost on a par with F1 drivers.
@@AidanMillward But what if F1 and Indycar series did something like the endurance racing competitions and made their car regulations similar. Allowing for teams to race in both leagues, share tech & development, etc. Okay I may just want the Indy 500 to be part of the F1 calendar because I am a nutter.
@Taurevanime it used to be part of the championship from 1950 until about 1960. But, because you had a championship that had the best x amount of results from x amount of races back then, there was no need for the European f1 teams to show up to indy in order to win the championship. I think only McLaren, who already have an indycar team, would do well at indy compared to other f1 teams because the other teams don't want or need the infrastructure to essentially build 2 separate cars for one specific race in the championship. So it'd be like the 1950s. No f1 team except McLaren would show up for the race.
@@Taurevanime I think Tony George "selling" the Indy 500 to F1 instead of creating IRL would have been an interesting what if. Could have been a bigger blow to CART than the real-life ones? Would some teams jump to full-season F1 years only because of that race? Would CART- or USAC-based drivers allowed to compete as (pay) replacement drivers? Could the Indy 500 have changed some championship races? But also... ...if that happened, could that have been just a stunt: a negative ad against european drivers in ovals?
@@AidanMillwardlikely with Bernie, although I think it may have ended up as F3000/GP2/F2 USA, acting as a hyped up feeder series to drive US engagement in F1
My take is that Tony George wanted to bring back the halcyon days of his youth i.e. the 70's, when it was all American drivers contesting an all-oval series. The flaw in that logic, in my opinion, is that foreign drivers and road racing were already there, they're just easy to ignore because they were split off into a different series: Formula 5000. Sure, it wasn't as big as Indy, but it washed its own face and a lot of its drivers came from overseas (my preferred auto rag had a few articles last year detailing Aussie drivers trying their luck for the huge prize money available stateside). It's easy to overlook because it was run by the SCCA rather than USAC, but it was still an American open-wheel series that specialised in road and street courses; it had a fanbase, and if you put its schedule alongside the same from USAC for any given year, you get something that looks an awful lot like a latter-day CART calendar. And when it finally folded, it gifted CART a new blue-ribbon event in the Long Beach Grand Prix, and a new power team in Newman/Haas Racing. Food for thought.
I admit I didn't even know about the split until late 2002 when Dixon was contracted to move with Chip Ganassi to Indycar it was all rather confusing for someone who was only following US open wheel racing for one driver
It’s funny how Jeff Gordon raced in USAC and wanted to go to Indy but did a Buddy Baker Racing test at Rockingham in NASCAR cars and never looked back.
There's a lot of mythology about that Buddy baker story. Gordon never looked back because there was nothing to look back to. He tried to get into IndyCars and was laughed at and told to get lost. We know who laughed last.
I'm just imagining NASCAR executives in the 90's singing "NA NA NA NA HA HA HA HA" at Tony George because they got Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart even left the IRL for NASCAR.
one other x-factor in indycar's struggle to reclaim faim (other than the 500) is the dan wheldon crash. that was such a huge blow to the series and its effects are still felt today imo. if that las vegas race in 2011 went off without a hitch or had little hiccups then indycar no doubt is in a completely different place today. where indycar is now is the same place it was just after reunification-- stagnated, only this time the cars are different and ovals aren't taking up half the schedule.
I agree. A lot of people underestimate how much that 2011 Las Vegas race tragedy changed the direction and format of Indycar by further reducing the amount of oval races and increasing road and street courses.
which one, specifically? He did one on the DTM turned ITC, though I'm still tryin to wrap my head around how the rebooted DTM just ended up a GT3 class and a shell of what it once was. When you resemble the death knell of Super Touring and manage to somehow not even steady that out, then....there's absolutely something very very very wrong. BTCC rebounded after a while, DTM did not, though I'm not sure how sustainable a German focuse championship or series really is thoughf
@@jacekatalakis8316the reason why DTM found itself racing GT3s is that Class One cars were pointless, and the manufacturers were not interested. The GT500 class of Super GT managed to survive only because, for some reason, the manufacturers were (and are) interested. The sad truth is that there is no point in racing high-downforce prototypes that resemble touring cars and GT cars minus the somewhat exciting racing. Also, there was probably not enough interest from public. All this reasons are why DTM "died" and, in the meanwhile, NASCAR and the Supercars Championship thrive.
Tony George wanted control over CART in the early 90’s. When he couldn’t get that he took his ball and went home. He spent hundreds of millions out of his family’s fortune to prop up the IRL for the 12 years it took for CART to eventually weaken and die. In the end he got what he wanted, a series that was morphing into CART 2.0 but with him in charge. For Tony George, the split was a great success - until he actually needed some of those millions back and sold out to Penske.
I would love to see Indycar open up to flyaway events in other countries again. I know it's going through its own problems, but just imagine Indycar at a track like Donnington in the UK or Interlagos in Brazil. I'm sure Australia still has enough goodwill to put something together there as well.
I think we're underestimating the 'role' Bernie played during The Split. Without it, I don't think Formula One would've returned to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and as a consequence there won't be a boom in the popularity of F1 in the United States (which was frozen for a while - thanks 2005 USGP). For Bernie, The Split happened at the right place, at the right time - he convinced Tony George to pour Millions of $$$ into developing an infield road course (which still uses portion of the oval), while delivering a serious blow to CART (F1's chief rival in the 90's) in the process. I'd say that the France family also had some behind the scenes dealings with TG to wound CART.
Tony made a ton of money off the Brickyard 400, likely more than he made off of F1; because unlike Bernie, NASCAR doesn't rape and pillage the host in sanctioning fees.
Bernie alledegedly played both sides. He gave money to TG at the start of the split and started covertly investing in Champcar around 03-05 to keep the IRL and Champcar fighting as long as possible.
If it sent it back thirty years, we would have had what USAC Championship Racing was all about. The "big race" along with the the lesser known races like Milwaukee, Phoenix, etc. Also, the dirt cars, which is where the Silver Crown Series came from. That was when you had America drivers who could match anyone, because they were doing it. F1 wasn't the draw for North American drivers, because they didn't believe, and rightfully so, that travelling all over God's green earth could get them anything better than what they had at home.
I was on the CART/Champcar as it was on Motors TV back in the day when I was exploring racing outside F1. I still think it was a better product, but it needed to be better managed: The engine rules issues, Cancelled races, the stupid floatation and then the problems with Broadcast dealing. It majorly harmed the sport and was not worth it, and ironically, the series has turned to BTEC cart. Even now, you can see the worry over another split that has stopped progress over the new chassis, the failure to get a 3rd engine and the lack of balance in the schedule. If IndyCar could get over this, there is such a growth potential, excaully as diehard F1 Fans dropout.
The Split put the sport back decades and IndyCar has been trapped in stagnation since the reunification They're afraid to take calculated risks while F1 and NASCAR have made them pay off
@mvd4436 risk like adding 1 race to the schedule. Adding an 18th race to schedule is considered too risky despite strong ticket sales in the last couple of years.
Are kidding me? F1? F1 is boring af. I am German and I dont watch this crap since 2010... IndyCar is superior to F1! In so many ways!!! Looks, fights, championship, way more spectacular, every year different champs, no 100 race win streaks... What F1 are you watching? The one from the 90s? Or 80s? Cant be the current running. There was one season since 2010 in which you couldnt say in the first race, who will win the championship! And you call that taking calculated risks and make them paying off? R U KIDDING ME??? xD They hardly race when its raining... Pays off a lot... Really had to laugh.... I dunno about NASCAR, but on F1 you are just wrong...
@@johnthefalcon2903 because they majority is getting crazier, doesnt mean the product has gotten better... I dont care what the attendence is! The large the attendence the more boring are the events...
I was there. It was bitter. I know stories that most don't know, and gotta tell you it was worse than most know. Having said that, nothing that limits IndyCar today is due to that split. BTW, the split started in 1978, kinda reunified in 1982-ish, and then broke open again in 1996.
I remember this and as an Al Unser, Jr. fan I didn't understand why my favorite guy wasn't on TV anymore. So I switched to NASCAR and picked up the Jeff Gordon bandwagon. I didn't even give open wheel another thought until they started showing abbreviated versions on CZcams a few years ago.
When I read Oreowicz’s book “Indy Split”, I had the same feeling that the main characters in Burn After Reading came to at the end of the movie. “So what’d we learn?’ ‘Ahhh, don’t do that?” From the IRL side, Tony had good intentions, but he had two things not going right, timing (as Aiden and Robin Miller pointed out) and advisors that either didn’t have a clue about building a racing series or they were ego maniacs. If Tony did this in ‘88-90, it might have worked. There was a lot of in-fighting with CART at the time. It might have panned out ok then. American Open Wheel has a strange history, especially in the last 50 years. NASCARMAN History did a great series on The Split that gets into the origins of how CART was formed to today. Well worth a watch there.
I hated the IRL. The first nail was seeing Penske leave and the final nail in the coffin was Ganassi. I went to an IRL Indy 500 and it was filled by hasbeens and drivers not good enough for Indycar. It was as exciting as getting poison oak.
It's funny how Tony George won & immediately gets replaced. What this current Indycar product needs to happen is a unbelievable rivalry that catches up with Nascar
I heard that Bill France Jr. gave Tony George the idea for the IRL at the 1994 Brickyard 400. Considering that NASCAR reaped the benefits of the open-wheel war, I'd say that it's plausible.
Tony George looked to the France family for business advice....it was at the behest of Mr. France that the Indy Racing League move away from turbocharged engines to naturally aspirated V8s "run what ya brung" from 1997-2001. If you look up video from Montoya's first Indy 500 win, the cars sound like stock cars.
I think Tony George already was making threats as early as 1992 and got more aggressive by pre season 1994...Paul Page was talking about Tony George creating the Indy Racing League during the Surfer's Paradise broadcast.
Here is my perspective, as a American motorsports fan, whose favorite series has been IndyCar, under all its names, for 50+ years. When USAC controlled the series, it was the Indy 500 and a bunch of low attended, barely broadcast oval support races. The team owners formed CART, added street and road courses and made the series as popular or more popular than the 500. The mistake made was not giving Tony George a place at the table for power and money. The owners should have realized that the Indy 500 was the crown jewel and George controlled that. The split certainly hurt the sport and all of those involved. George spent so much money securing the IRL that the family eventually rebelled against him and he lost the legacy property left by his grandparents. I'm sure the split helped NASCAR, but it would have become popular with the rubbing is racing" crowd anyway, after the 1979 Daytona race and fight. And the only benefit for F1 was that IndyCar would no longer be a threat to it internationally. F1 was never a draw in the US until the recent DTS driven popularity. IndyCar has better racing that F1 and NASCAR, but will likely never get back to where it could have been.
Let's see...Tony George was mad that Roger Penske and friends had taken Indy car racing as a whole away from his family's control, that there were too many right turns, that short track oval racers didn't have a viable career path that led to the Indy 500 because their lack of road racing experience made them a liability for the rest of the championship, that the engine manufacturers held too much sway because of lease arrangements, and that there were too many F1 rejects on the grid. So he solved this by chasing away all the sponsors and fans, and then sold his broken handiwork to Roger Penske, who now owns a series that looks exactly like the one he was angry about, except with less money because he chased away all the sponsors and fans and the efforts to claw them back have been moderately successful but extremely slow-going.
Tony George's mistake was that his effort was half-assed. He threw the CART guys out and then just copied their series. Of course the same type drivers were going to filter back into the IRL as were filling the grid in CART because the cars in both series favored the same type drivers. What he should have done is built an entirely new car, maybe off the Super Modified model, and made those the new IRL car. That would have drawn both the circle track drivers and fans back to IndyCar. Instead he just built a cheaper Euro-Formula car which favored Euro-Formula drivers who weren't good enough for F1 or even CART. And that's what the IRL still is today. The sport, at that point, needed a real revolution and Tony George had to bring in something that was genuinely new, but he didn't have the guts for it and that doomed the IRL from the beginning. I followed the IRL from the beginning and remember going into the first race, none of the IRL team owners wanted to give Tony Stewart a ride. There was a wait & see attitude amongst us fans who were willing to give the IRL a chance because we hated what IndyCar had become--a second rate Formula One. There was practically a revolt on the CompuServe Racing Forum (the top online racing site at that time) when it seemed that Tony Stewart, who was exactly the type driver the IRL was supposedly created for, wasn't going to get a seat. Tony George had to beg John Menard to give him his third car to get Stewart in the field in order to keep the few fans he had from fleeing before their first race was even run. And we fans knew, from that point, that outside of AJ Foyt, the IRL team owners were basically the same bunch of sports car dude-bros who ran CART, only they were the ones who couldn't cut it in CART, and the IRL was going to be more of the same thing, only at a lower level. What a shit show!
I don't really understand the issue very well, and don't really 'get' North American motorsport, but it seems to me that all that matters to the sponsors and the fans is the Indy 500, which isn't a strong basis for anything that could be expensive and sustainable. An interesting question might be, would F1 today look any different from the current IRL if the only race that anyone actually cared about or payed attention to was Monaco?
Indy is/was the party. You have hard-core IndyCar fans that travel like those who go to F1 races, wherever they are. Then you have (mostly) dirt track open-wheel fans, which is where old USAC Championship style cars came from, that lived with the belief that if you can go to only one race? Then Indy it is. Then you have the kids that just love it for the noise and constant sensory overload. Then those who want to be seen by those that "matter."
@@steruss9481 That's true, and I suppose you can see some issues that arise from that, such as Toyota being effectively the only team in Hypercar for a long time, or the collapse of Group C and so on. I love the WEC, and think it's some of the best racing out there, but the dominance of Le Mans does have it's consequences, and suspect the same is true for Indy car vis a vis the Indy500
While French, I loved watching CART races on Eurosport, from Nigel Mansell's move across the Pond, until about 1997, I'd say. I had zero interest in any oval race but the Indy 500, so I avoided almost all but 1/year, thus IRL being just like Nascar to me: 100% pure unadulterated American Boredom. Smaller ovals felt like the acme of this senselessness. Having these 2 championships essentially made me less interested in CART overall, on top of great F1 competition between 1997 and 2000, which is a shame, considering I was happy about knowing J. Villeneuve's previous endeavours when he got into F1, or seeing some backmarker names reappear on the other side of the Atlantic. What T. Georges did was sad, and indeed looks like an awful loss of time and money. How he could even lose his grip on his own sham of a series after it eventually won out is unfathomable to me.
The whole thing was like that episode of Star Trek where Kirk gets split into two people by a malfunctioning transporter. Each separate Kirk (or AOWR series) was unbalanced and could only be put right by putting the two back together. AOWR was basically ruined for several years by a few rich, egotistical men for reasons that amount to nothing more than hubris. And it'll never quite find its way back again...
Interesting video. I’d say its more of a merger right now with the low cost approach of IRL alongside CARTS variety. Another ideas would be: Could GT1 have been saved?
Having 2 races at the IMS is also... interesting. Like imagine if F1 decided to go to Monaco twice in one season. I like IndyCar and I appreciate how competitive and fun the races can be, but i feel like there needs to be some sort of shake up to get more people interested.
The reason we have two IMS Road Course races was originally for COVID reasons, bit afterwards NBC, who owns the IndyCar rights and the last half of the NASCAR season, wanted a doubleheader weekend someplace and Roger Penske volunteered. Otherwise the 2nd IMS race would have been dropped.
@@danielhenderson8316 yeah it's not a bad idea, and I do think the whole weekend as a double header with NASCAR is fun, it just feels a little bit unimaginative
I remember thinking for years before the start of the IRL that CART was getting too far from oval racing, and the grassroots American open wheel racers really didn't have a chance. Jeff Gordon grew up wanting to race Indy cars, but before that opportunity had a chance to happen, he got picked up by Bill Davis to run in the NASCAR Busch Grand National Series...where he was noticed by Rick Hendrick, and the rest is history. Tony George didn't want to lose out on another driver like that, so I completely understand the intentions behind what he did. I just thought he should've tried to make changes within the existing series, instead of breaking off to start a competing series. Being the president of IMS, he obviously carried a lot of weight. From the first IRL race at Disney World, I was a little uneasy about the idea of whole new series. Things like the 25-8 rule, the U.S. 500, and then fans getting killed by flying debris at Michigan and Charlotte, and the two series constantly shooting themselves in the foot didn't help. And the big winner in the whole thing? NASCAR, which grew a lot bigger, faster than it would have if there had been competition from a healthy Indy car series. Now it's been fifteen years since the end of The Split...and we're back to where we were with CART in 1995: An American open-wheel series with too-few oval races. But while it might not quite have the stature that CART did in 1995, I think it's in a better place than it was, say, five years ago. And also, NASCAR is not exactly going gangbusters these days.
Irony is that the IRL was created to grab talent like Tony Stewart, arguably the greatest all-around driver in the last 30 years. However, he won a title then moved straight to Nascar. Then guys like Hornish, Franchitti, Pruett, Yeley, Robby Gordon, etc chose to leave for NASCAR (with pretty bad results). In the end, George was right about two things. 1. Cost control. He was ahead of the game in that regard. 2. Safety. Considering his drive and determination led the way of many safety creations and institutions.
AJ Allmendinger was in Champ Cars and when he won a couple of races he couldn't get to NASCAR fast enough. There was no room for American drivers in CART or the IRL in those days and there aren't many now. It's a European series grafted onto the US racing scene.
@@23GreyFox IndyCar is supposed to be a national championship, not a world championship. Since it's supposed to be the national championship open wheel racing series, it should reflect what open wheel racing is in the country where the series exists. It does not. US open wheel racing is what you see in USAC or World of Outlaws or other similar series. It is not what you see in IndyCar, which is why there are so few American drivers in IndyCar and so few people follow IndyCar in the US, especially as compared to the days when IndyCars reflected what American racing was, down to it grass roots level, and produced the type of racing American fans want to see. Instead you have it as a top level national championship with no legitimate supporting series underneath to produce drivers for that form of racing, which is why drivers have to be imported. It's as if you had the whole structure of youth and development baseball from Little League up to college and when players got to the Major Leagues they had to play cricket. They'd have to import players to play that too.
@@RRaquello Well that will only work after a complete rebuild of the series. Most Indy teams are not interested in oval racing. I'm also not sure if a open wheel and oval only racing series would work so well in the US. Most American racing fans love speed and crashes. Maybe that's also why Rally events don't exist in the US. What US fans want and fans in the rest of the world are total opposites.
@@23GreyFox I think a rebuild of the series is what's needed, but it can't happen now. It's too late. This is where Tony George was a real shmuck. He could have returned the sports to its proper roots when he started the whole IRL thing, but he didn't have the guts to take such a gamble. Instead he just produced a watered-down CART, which alienated the CART fans but didn't produce the type of racing wanted by the fan base he was trying to reach. A typical half-assed effort.
I was a big IndyCar fan in the '90s, but like many American motorsports fans, the split eventually made me lost touch with the series. Also, NASCAR doesn't do a whole lot for me (I don't disrespect NASCAR or its drivers, they are the best in the world at racing "stock" cars on ovals, it's just not my thing), so I kind of lost touch with motorsport in general until the 2010s when it started to be easier to follow F1 in the USA. Now in the last few years, I am back into IndyCar as well and feel that their races are often more entertaining than F1, but the split definitely wasn't close to worth it. The schedule is basically the same as before and instead of being the preeminent American motorsport series, NASCAR is about 4x more popular. NASCAR may have passed it anyway, but I imagine that if the split didn't happen it would be much closer.
nice video, the whole split thing does seem like a waste of time consoidereing how mauch dammge it caused, I jsut glad it happened pre social media because in this social media era i imagine it would be way worse
Love this format, Aidan, keep it up! I was a massive CART/Champ Car fan. Particularly Justin Wilson. (There's a talent who never quite got the car needed to win championships IMHO. Don't argue, I won't like it 😝) What _really_ p'd me off was the loss of CC from Eurosport and Indycar going behind the Sky sports "paywall". I'll never forgive George for that. If CC or CART (the name didn't matter) had continued its success, maybe we would still have Justin around. It's always the Poison Dwarf who wins out, isn't it? Did he find a magic lamp with a genie inside it? Is _he_ a genie? Who knows!
I was a big Justin Wilson fan too, and saw his first win in Toronto, sitting in the packed grandstand just above his pit box. He had a bright future, and deserved so much more success.
I’m sure that champcar would have folded in 2008 if it wasn’t for the re-merger. They were down to 17 cars with walker making noises of pulling their 2 cars. But irl would also have been down to 17 cars until it suddenly went up to about 28, falling down to low 20s within a few years. Cart was great, though Indycar today is a fair bit safer.
I’ve been into F1 since I was a kid, but I’m ashamed to admit that all I knew about Indy500 was J Villeneuve & Montoya had come from that weird oval racing they did in the USA. However I’ve got properly into it since Alonso tried it, now I’m as addicted to Indycar as I am to F1. I think Indycar has become a LOT more popular in the UK since it’s been shown on the SkyF1 channel here. Although many of my F1 fwends still won’t watch Indycar 😂
Not sure if its rose coloured glasses but I still vividly remember as a kid, crossing the pedestrian bridge over Lakeshore Drive at the Molson Indy in Toronto. Positioned just as the cars went into 6th gear, shaking the bridge. CART was better. The absurdity of them going 230+MPH average at Michigan in the mid 90's. Great now I have to go play Formula USA Gen2 in AMS2
It was weird growing up in the American South during the split. IndyCar went from something that was must see TV, to 2 also-ran series, almost overnight, while NASCAR, already the preferred racing series in the region, became King, but started making choices that brought it to its peak but also laid the foundation for its slow decline. Its also weird to think about what might have happened to Tony Stewart if it weren't for the split - he got a chance in the IRL because of The Split, but The Split made his defection to NASCAR inevitable. Would he have still broken through if The Split didn't happen? If he didn't, would he have been recruited to NASCAR from the Sprint Car ranks like Jeff Gordon was? If he did break through into IndyCar, would he have still made the jump to NASCAR? Would JGR be the powerhouse team it is today without him driving for them during the early 2000's?
@@mattiasgarbi9470 I'm not sure the universe could've handled Smoke and The Michael or Alonso on the grid at the same time, especially if Tony Stewart was in a competitive car. We would've had fist fights on the podium. Can you imagine a Tony Stewart helmet throw at Michael Schumacher after being wrecked out for the championship? It would have been Senna v. Prost on steroids.
I got an issue that IndyCar got a more complex history... My answer is no it didn't worth it, but I also think it was hard to avoid because of a mix of history, economics, and different wants. Basically, both series were stuck in an economic bubble.
The split was inevitable the day Jack Brabham showed up at Indianapolis with his Cooper-Coventry-Climax Special. That was 1961. Opposing and irreconcilable forces were set in motion that took 30 years to completely unravel IndyCar.
@@RRaquello Well, between USAC wanted to keep budget low and keep the Indy 500 as the big show. The SCCA wanting Formula 5000 and the Can-am to work. IMCA which weirdly enough had some influence up to the late 1950s. F1 and Nascar wanting the audience... It was a hard place to be for Cart. However, what didn't help was the budgets exploding in the 1980s with Cosworth and Chevrolet finally driving out the Offy (last Offy raced in 1983) (albeit, Pontiac did show up in 1984, it was mostly all Cosworth and Ilmor Chevy by that point, some Buick). USAC mismanagement and bad relationship with the teams didn't help in the late 1970s and early 2000 (they were officiating IRL for a little while). And the dotcom bubble also didn't help because a lot of people thought that money grow on trees (both Cart and IRL are guilty on that one). Basically, the split "could have been an email" about cost reduction and technical rules.
I read that Bill France told George that he didn't need those team owners and should go his own way. France put him up to it, they created the useless Brickyard race thus diminishing Indy itself never minding the series, and George's lost leverage, and NASCAR soared.
Loved CART from the split up until about 2002 after which the IRL was my thing. I actually still really miss those IRL seasons when most of the races were on ovals.
As an American who was heavily into racing during this time period I can say that it was not only not worth it, but the worst thing that ever happened in the history of American racing for many reasons. You touched on CART having the best of both worlds with ovals and road courses and that's what made it enjoyable to watch. Trying to turn Indy cars into oval racers just made it a NASCAR knock off series. Part of the appeal of NASCAR is "Rubbing is racing". Those closed wheel stock cars can get in close and go 2 to 3 wide in corners. Open wheel cars can't do that. It's fun to watch an oval race once in a while, but watching people turn left for 4 hours gets boring and without the tension of being on the razors edge of a crash because the cars can actually touch, it's not something that many people want to watch on a steady basis. The TV aspect was the HUGE nail in the coffin. At the time there were tiers of television. Network television had the larger audience and the most money. Anything on cable was thought of as second tier. CART cars were on Network TV every week. NASCAR was on Network TV for the Daytona 500 and then it was back to cable. Not only back to cable but depending on what race it was, it could have been on any of 3 different networks. NASCAR wasn't even able to pull off a stable TV deal on a cable network at the time. As you pointed out NASCAR was the big winner in America. Dale Earnhardt was rising to dominance at this time so the timing was also fortuitous. TBH it's the worst time to be a racing fan in America right now. NASCAR is killing itself with gimmicks, and even before that happened most race fans don't want to watch cars turn left for 4 hours. Oval racing is fun to watch at your local track. When you can go there and smell the burning rubber and racing fuel. Being a part of the experience is exciting. It makes you appreciate it on a larger scale. Short tracks are closing down all over the country and NASCAR runs fewer short track races as the years go by. Honestly, those are the most exciting races to watch. Super speedways are boring. Restrictor plates just turn it into an artificially competitive race that relies too heavily on drafting and without the restrictor plates a few cars take off and put literal one mile leads on the next pack. It goes from over crowded racing with restrictor plates to the polar opposite without them. CART still hasn't recovered from this and as fun as IMSA can be, watching 4 different classes race for a certain period of time with 4 different winners take a lot of the excitement out of it. There just isn't anything close to what CART was before this happened and I don't see how American racing will ever recover. Honestly, I preferred pre-split CART to F1. There was a lot less politics and the cheating was almost unheard of. In F1 it isn't even a question of "Did someone cheat this year?" but "Who cheated this year and how much of an advantage did they gain?" Between the cheating and having to stay up until 3 AM on a Sunday to watch a race I can't really get into F1. I really want to enjoy racing again. There just isn't anything available to me that scratches the itch of what CART used to be. The few times a year that I can catch a race on TV it's so overloaded with commercials that I can't even sit through the half way mark of the race.
Indy cars WERE oval track cars. They were once ONLY oval track cars. Cars that ran pavement AND dirt. Jack Brabham and Colin Chapman changed what pavement Indy cars became. If it wasn't for that, Indy cars would likely still be oval track cars, but more in the line of Super Modified cars. (Not NASCAR pavement modifieds. Those are a whole different beast.)
1990’s Cart was absolutely incredible amazing car’s circuits & drivers. I just watch indycar now thinking we need an extra 150hp & a touch more downforce
The thing Tony George failed to understand was that the reason CART was as popular as it was at that point was defo because of the international talent, especially the F1 stars. Mansell brought in so many British and F1 fans, that it actually became a thing over here in the UK. Before that people pretty much only knew the Indy 500, not that there was a whole championship attached to it. And making IRL ovals only alienated a lot of those fans as lets face it, how many times have you heard F1 fans or whatever complain about oval racing that it "takes no skill and all you are doing is turning left all the time"? That goes for NASCAR as well. The split hurt both series. While IRL from the outside looks like the winner, it really wasn't. Lets not forget that George was pretty much ousted by his sisters from Indiapolis Speedway due to spending so much of the family money, although if you believe Tony (which I dont) he quit. Tony George really is the reason the popularity of open wheel racing tanked in the USA until F1 started to get a foothold in recent years.
A few things.... 1. Outside of the Indy 500, CART had most of the circuits that were a draw and popular with fans--which happened to be primarily road/street courses....the promoters and infrastructure were already turn key when the merger happened in 2008. Many of the oval tracks were owned by the France family (or managed by their NASCAR underlings) which as an aside why IRL used NASCAR sounding naturally aspirated V8s from 1997-2001...TG (Tony George) took his business decisions to the France family as he had few to no allies in American Open Wheel Racing...only until the IRL became the low cost lifeboat when Ganassi and Penske left CART after 2002....also part of the deal was to open up the series to a more diverse calendar regarding circuits....IRL adding St Pete in 2005 with mostly oval racers ahead of the merger. Furthermore, a handful of tracks that came from CART were all under the stable of Green Savoree Promotions....they still run the races at St Pete, Toronto, Portland and one or two more. The IRL was better at cutting costs than CART..even at the expense of being the least sexy option of American Open Wheel Racing (AOWR) 2. The Indy Racing League/IRL (now IndyCar) in 2002 started to pool prize money purses and give lump sum payments at the end of the year to the top 22 entrants...rather than give paltry sums after every event...this was paid for by Indy 500 profits which helped keep costs down for owners initially...this was called the Leaders Circle...of which Andretti/Green (now Andretti Autosport) was grandfathered in to have 4 guaranteed entrants eligible for a Leaders Circle payout at the outset of the program whereas every other team only was eligible for 3 (presuming they all made the top 22 for the year)...Teams like Ganassi and Penske only have 3 entries eligible since they joined the LC program after it began. So even if all 4 current Ganassi entries (as of 2023) finish inside the top 22 in points...only 3 of them are eligible...based on which entered car joined the program first? (Not sure here). 3. The IRL for many reasons good and bad had come up with 2 cost-effective enough chassis suppliers in Dallara, with its Indy Racing-05 (aka IR-05) and Panoz (G-Force) platforms. CART was hellbent on throwing money they didn't have to the fire every year for development into oblivion..... "cheapness" (let's call it extreme frugality) led to why IndyCar didn't get paddle shifting on its cars until 2008...again when they merged....it should be noted that the Panoz/G-Force chassis barely survived into the merger when it stopped being competitive.
Admittedly I'm a short tracker, a USAC homer if you will. I spend my Saturday nights turning wrenches on a Sprint Car. My favorite 500 of the last 25 years was 2016 because my friend, a home grown sprint car kid, got to lead the 500 and I was there to see it. I have always loved Indy car because of the speedway and its history. CART made me appreciate road racing in ways that F1 or Sportscars never could. That said, the theory of what TG was trying to do was fabulous... I was a huge IRL fan because of one simple fact.... The guys that I watched at Terre Haute, or Manzanita, or Kokomo, or Duquoin would get a shot at the Speedway. Tony Stewart, Billy Boat, Ed Carpenter, Brian Tyler, these guys were my heroes. I will never forget standing on the pit road fence on Pole day in 97' astonished I was going to get to see Tony, and Billy in good rides for the 500. That was the purpose of it all. And then it went this direction, because of guys like Ganassi and Penske. Hence why I cant stand either. Penske was at the heart of the CART/ USAC split with Pat Patrick and Dan Gurney in 78/79'. Him and Patrick were at the heart of the dirt miles falling off the Championship trail in 70'. Tony George was 100% correct in understanding that the popularity of CART had a bubble. That is part of why NASCAR surpassed it, because once it emerged from being a regional series and guys like Tim Richmond, Kenny Schrader, the Bodines, Jeff Gordon etc became stars it had the drivers that your short trackers grew up watching and wanting to be. Jim Bob Dirtguy didnt know or care about Sebastian Bourdais, or Jan Magnussen. The fight limited TG's ability to create American Superstars and so most of them went NASCAR racing because thats where the money was, because even if they had their heart set on Indy a guy like Penske was never going to hire a short tracker. Last guy to sit in a Penske seat that had run a sprint car was Al Jr.
If a short track guy is fast, e.g., as fast or faster than Power and Newgarden, then why wouldn't Penske hire him? Penske even hired Scott McLaughlin who was a touring car driver from Australia/New Zealand with no open wheel experience at all.
Was your friend Bryan Clauson? He was exactly the kind of driver TG wanted to race in his series, but as I'm sure you know, he drove more NASCAR Nationwide races than IndyCar, and would have probably ended up with a full time ride in the main NASCAR series. I'm very sorry he is no longer with us.
@@OboeCanAm yes BC is who I was referencing. A wheelman of the highest order that if timing had been slightly different I fully believe would be racing on Sundays. That said he was the last of us shortrackers to get to the Speedway for the foreseeable future. It's still the greatest race in the world.. Just missing a few deserving wheelmen
IRL was rough. I was young when the split happened so my opinions have some degree of hignsight. I was more of a CART fan. Those indycar chassis' were kinda pigs. cheaper than CART but lacking the WOW factor.
The current indycar universe is all about cost containment and equalization. Unlike F1, where a seat in a Minardi (uh Toro Rosso, sorry honey badger) gets you to call 13th place a win, the Indycar Dallaras are at least somewhat equal and you get a picture of driver (and team) ability. Call it Spec Miata if you must but it's kinda working.
You can’t even look at it and say “well at least Tony George got control from a business standpoint“ because, while he did, he got control of something that was probably 25% as valuable as it was before. I also agree with you that the CART business model was unsustainable in the mid 90s, but I wonder if they would have instead wound up where they are now, simply under a third-party sanctioning
They would have ended up more like F1 is today with cost cutting measures, but still retain most of the popularity of the sport (along with Alex Zanardi and Greg Moore running the Indy 500 like they should have).
@@danielhenderson8316 Exactly, CART would have ridden the tobacco wave (even more so after f1 went0 away from it) and slowly transitioned to cost cutting and at the worst point would have been like today's indycar. Rather than losing boatloads of projected revenue, the popularity of US open wheelers tanking and desperately using gimmicks and overseas attempts to stay afloat. TG ruined US open wheel financially,popularity wise and as a product just because of his ego to "beat" CART
It had to be better for the few years it existed . . . until the money ran out. CART took the best of everything when they started. The only thing they didn't have were the titled events and a good business plan. The inmates wanted to run their own asylum, and it was good. That is, until the weight of their own monster crushed them.
@@DDS029Except the money only ran out because of greedy selfish Tony George. And him being willing to ruin the whole scene to beat CART by losing mountains of money to undercut sponsorships and using crapwagons that were cheap and the indy 500 to entice teams. Great business, if business meant a less profitable, worse product monopoly with near zero international interest. It seemed Tony was more interested in putting CART out of business than the success of us open wheel racing
Nice vid. One objection since I don't want people to get a wrong idea of the history is how NASCAR blew up in popularity. Yes Gordon and Earnhardt were factors but I think it was a dozen factors. It wasn't something you can point to one or two things to explain its success. It's not like F1 where two rivals will finish on the podium almost every race. Even in Gordon's incredibly dominant season he only won 30% of races, and he was getting booed massively for it because it was so extremely unusual and the southerners didn't like him. NASCAR had at least a dozen really popular drivers at the time, the racing was much more exciting than F1 IRL Cart etc, the TV coverage was incredibly good.. think like F1 now vs F1 much worse tv in the 90s, NASCAR TV in the 90s was as quality as f1 today. Plus it was basically every Sunday afternoon which makes for a consistent viewing experience. Speaking as someone who watched NASCAR, F1, and cart at the time, and mostly just F1 now
While I enjoy the video there were a couple things as a life long indycar fan I'd like to point out. It was less TG wanted to make it all American but rather return it to its roots. Indycar was always an oval series. Road and street courses didn't become more prevalent till the mid 80s. He saw alot of indy talent being farmed out to f1 and f1 teams using cart for their talent and it didn't sit as well that the massive amount of drivers on the former usac ladder weren't getting a shot anymore, where the vast majority of great indycar drivers used to come from. He didn't want indycar to be part of the F1 ladder. The other was costs. like you said cart was very expensive and even in the pre 9/11 crash there was the mid 90s crash that lead to gt1 racing replacing protypes. Cart felt that and really one of the few sports to escape it was nascar since they were in their period of record growth. They had come to run at Indy when only grumbling about a potential split were happening. NASCAR would have continued it's rise in popularity because it had been set in motion by the 1st usac Cart split decades earlier when big tobacco went to nascar over indycar. While 100% the split wasn't worth it, IRL was a bit more forward thinking about costs and saftey for drivers while cart was living of a car they couldn't sustain. There is stuff I left out too but I feel it's hard to look at the split as a casual fan because it's roots go back to the 70s and there are so many twists and turns to it. Sorry for the Ted talk wall of text.
even though im mostly a nascar fan i like indycar and grew up with both the merger thing flew over my head when i was a kid then when i was older and looked at everything i could find about the split it just seemed silly and hurt both sports even though indycar won you can still feel the damage from it
S1apSh0es put it pretty bluntly early in his video "Is NASCAR Heading For a Split?"; "if it wasn't for the Indy 500 raking in hundreds of millions every year, that series would have folded years ago". Modern IndyCar is fun to watch and popular with drivers and hardcore fans, but the lingering after-effects like the more limited schedule, lost sponsorships and TV ratings, and less manufacturer interest make it more alternative than mainstream compared to NASCAR and F1.
I did a video on that whole thing as well. Indycar is hurting it’s growth by putting its eggs entirely into the Indy 500 basket and having the other events to just justify a series.
@@AidanMillward Other than the Indy 500, the most successful events they have are the street races, which have huge investor backing, and Iowa, which the HyVee regional grocery store chain in the Midwest promotes heavily, this year with a concert headlined by Ed Sheeran and the Zac Brown Band. Any other place that doesn't have that level of support is left out. I live in the Northeast and had to travel to St. Pete to see my first IndyCar race since we lost Pocono due to safety and also Richmond to the pandemic and lack of sponsorship. IndyCar lost so much of their audience during the Split era to their competition, and it'll be even harder to claw back now with sports as a whole losing audience and advertising share to other forms of entertainment.
"CART was at the height of its power and popularity. Okay, it was never going to reach the global status of formula one..." What exactly do you base that assumption on? In terms of global TV viewers, CART was only slightly lower than F1 when it came to regular races, while the Indy 500 was the most watched one-day sporting event in the world, even clearly surpassing the super bowl. And while F1's numbers were dropping after the death of Senna and the retirements of Prost, Piquet and Mansell, CART's global TV numbers were constantly rising. Sure, in Europe it only had a small (but growing) fan base that was nowhere near the level of popularity F1 had at the time. But vice versa F1 had an even smaller (and shrinking) fan base in the US, where CART was absolutely massive in popularity. In other markets such as south america, japan and australia both championships were almost equal, with CART experiencing faster growth numbers. CART had higher sponsor income, which allowed them to pay higher driver salaries. Car manufacturers spent more money on the development of their CART/Indy engines then they did on their F1 programs. And of course for several years there were more former F1 world champions participating in CART than in F1 itself. That does not even include Senna, who was also thinking about moving to CARTdue to the massive paycheck he could have earned over there. CART had not only reached the global status of F1, it arguably had already surpassed it. Then it all went down the drain, because Tony George rather wanted to be the king of a tiny swamp then the prince of an empire. And Bernie and the Frances were all too happy to help him demolish their main rival.
I didn't know anyone that followed IRL. I live in Ohio, and I think maybe it's because we have Mid-Ohio sports car course that people around here tend to like road courses more. I certainly am one of those people. I much more enjoyed going to see Champ cars at Mid-Ohio, than driving a state over to go to Indy. Indianapolis is about the spectacle, I have never seen more people in one place ever in my life. The better actual race to watch was Mid-Ohio, and Champ cars.
The CART/IRL split pushed me to F1 and aside from the Indy 500 I didn't watch American open wheel racing for years. I've come back around, but I'm still not a fan of the single chassis and 2 engine manufacturers building sealed engines the teams can't mess with. I remember going to Indy with my dad in the 80s for qualifying and Carb day and seeing the big Offenhauser(Offies, as my dad called them) engines and the subtle, and not so subtle, differences in the way teams built their cars. But I'm an old guy now, so...
The absolute irony of George being mad at the teams and what Indicar had become, creating his own series, winning the war against CART but now Penske owns it and it has esentially become what CART was and what George hated gg. As an European I don't have much insight, but it does feel like a big nothing burger.
The whole thing was like watching two petulant children arguing about not getting there way. But my loyalty was always to the greatest spectacle in racing more that anything else. In the end, I’m happy it sorted itself out! IndyCar proper is back with a a different look. But I do get one of Tony George’s key points. CART was getting ridiculously expensive and he created a series that cut the costs dramatically! Fun fact. The fastest recorded lap at Indy, unofficial or not, was done by Arie Lyendyke, during the first year of the IRL in a previous years CART IndyCar. CART didn’t get the honors of being the fastest cars ever at Indy even though it was one of their old cars.
I don't know if this idea has been done. But I would like to see the effect of cigarettes and racing as a whole. Because in my opinion, I think a lot of racing, especially by the '90s was subsidized by tobacco. Sponsors like Marlboro, kool and players probably gave away a lot of seats. I don't have full facts for this, but it probably was much bigger than it actually was. I look back to the imsa in the '80s when they had camel sponsorship. Their seats were packed as well.
That's true. But on the other hand Red Bull (who are just as wealthy as any cigarette sponsor) had both the an IRL team (the Cheever team) and their own NASCAR team, before dropping the IRL team for a single CART entry (driven by Doornbos) and then dropping open wheel sponsorship in the US entirely.
Tony George had a good idea on paper. America has its own unique motor sports culture. But if he wanted to bring back the USAC days, the cars needed to go front engine. Open engine, open chassis. Make the things 410 sprit cars but for speedways. Maybe have a handful of rounds on dirt. The goal was to have Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart go to Indy rather than Charlotte. He never got that the problem was the damn car.
They have/had that. It's called the USAC Silver Crown Series. It came to be when the pavement and dirt cars got so totally different from each other, the nail in that coffin came from Jack Brabham sticking his toe in the Indy waters, and Colin Chapman diving in head first and changing pavement racing so much that it could never go back to what USAC Championship Car racing was. Those were not cars builders over here had a grasp of. They needed to put down there tools, go outside, take a deep breath and change their business to fore go building cars for that series.
Oh yeah, I’m well aware of the history, and I’ve actually been to silver crown races at Toledo. My point was if Tony George was serious about bringing back the “good ol days” the 96 500 would have been run with those cars. Instead of the whole thing just being a naked power play that fucked American open wheel racing to this day.
I've been watching every IndyCar race and I've noticed no commercials with IndyCars in them, except HyVee and IndyCar themselves. Honda using Red Bulls and Chevy does their new 'IT' thing to market. Verizon might have a 5 second thing for one of Penske's cars at the end of a ad, but that's it. I live in Indy too.
When I was in Canada there were James Hinchcliffe cutouts in the windows of Honda dealers (I think. It was there or Canadian Tyre branches or something) but that was it.
Some racing series didn't expound to their sponsors to make the sponsorship really work is that they have to spend at a 3:1 ratio of advertising dollars supporting their sponsorship of said racing team.
The split was not just a “waste of time” it was utterly catastrophic to US open-wheel racing. It’s becoming increasingly staggering to see how the sport still to this day has not recovered. The series is okay, but had Indycar run the cars of 1996-2000 at the Indy 500… utter box office!! You suggest in the beginning of the video I think that it wasn’t going to rival F1? I totally disagree. Indycar had everything it needed to compete. Had Indycar gone into Europe unified with the Indy 500 as Champcar did in early 00s it could’ve seriously threatened F1. To this day the split stands as the greatest warning to anyone that proposes running a breakaway competition alongside the existing competition. Because not only does it not work, it fundamentally cripples the sport itself. Sadly, as history continues to show to this day, that lesson will be it’s greatest legacy.
Yes, it eliminated bad leadership in both series and 2 poor sanctioning bodies. The series now has both the sanctioning and series promotion under 1 umbrella. Just need a couple more ovals in the 1 mile range with very little banking.
The split came at the worst time. CART was doing well in the '90s, Nigel Mansell going there for '93 brought it so much attention on the world stage. It wasn't just that place where failed Brazillian F1 rejects go to earn a living any more. By the end of the decade the series was doing so well. Seems like 2001 and various things which happened that year was the turning point and started its decline... The expansion into European races wasn't a success either. Without the split a united single championship surely would have been able to weather the post-2001 economic slump and reluctance to fly/travel abroad better. [P.S. Have you done a video about how Mansell's time in Indycar went? 1993 didn't go how most people imagine, most wins coming on ovals - not what you would expect. That huge crash and injury - hiting the wall so hard it knocked a lump of concrete off the back face. And other things like the weaving controversy - introducing the Americans to the novel idea of defending you position on a road/street track (too dangerous to do on ovals ofc). Then 1994 came, you needed a Penske to win and....]
I love IndyCar, always have, always will, it is the greatest form of motorsport in the world, the world will always have greedy power-hungry people who do their dead level best to destroy something, but if it's a great product like IC is and always has been then it will survive
Honestly, you need about a 30-45 min discussion to fully understand the reasons and parse the winners and losers of the split and why the outcome was an version of Indycar that, on the surface, looks like CART pre-split, but very much isn’t.
Even around 2001 CART still had a decent amount of ovals, once all the ovals abandoned CART and switched to the IRL Cart was useless, especially once they stopped running a 500 mile oval race.
Yaknow, I’ve totally forgotten when this whole Roberto Moreno thing all started. Seems like a thousand years ago now. Doesn’t really matter, I’ll keep waiting.
I disagree with Indycar having become CART. It is lacking the prestige that CART had. The series has just finished its 12th season with the same chassis. Development of engines is nearly frozen. There is no technical development whatsoever. That was what CART was all about with multiple chassis, tyre and engine suppliers battling it out. That was part of the fascination. Already in the 90s Nascar had the better TV ratings. But CART had the prestige and the better sponsors. Now we have a spec racing series apart from some mechanical parts. Of course, the question whether Indycar without the split would have become an F1 rival or would have collapsed due to escalating will never be answered. Anyway, Tony George ruined it single handedly. One of greatest pyrrhic victories in the history of all commerce probably.
This will probably not go over so well with the formula car/road racing culture that seem to permeate the comments here, but....Although I agree that the split ended up basically with something resembling CART run by The Speedway, the real issue for us open wheel oval track fans in North America is that NOTHING definitive came out of the split. There's a serious cultural difference here as it relates to the road racing vs oval track stuff. It's not just the track configuration. Those of us who sided with The Speedway, really wanted sprint car, midget, and Supermodified drivers back in Indy car racing . I admit to being duped by the likes of Tony George and his opportunism, but, I think Indy car racing still should be the place where open wheel oval track racing is the focus and should be the destination series for that arm of the sport. The issue here though is that those that control Indy car are still of the Eurocentric formula car road racing culture and have no connection with open wheel oval track racing. This has caused a mass alienation of t he open wheel oval track fanbase and why they have no interest in whatever Indy car is selling these days. It's also a the reason Indy car has to put on silly street parades in Nashville and Detroit while perfectly useable ovals are nearby. The formula car road racing fanbase isn't large enough to sell seats at racing facilities like Michigan International Speedway...
This never could have happened without General Motors support of Indycar, at the height of CART's popularity Bernie Ecclestone was broaching some sort of merger with CART. The series has yet to recover from this, I haven't liked General Motors since the 80's but after this I had no respect for them in racing. This was a power play with no regard for the fans.
It destroyed open wheel racing in the US. CART would have gotten so much more tobacco money had it retained the monopoly and popularity with F1 moving away from it and CART being a more bang for buck option. Then instead of being in bad financial strife and having to shoot wildly to try to keep the audience and get international money, CART would have been slowly able to transition to smaller scale financial series. At its worst it would have been like Indycar is now. And in 2023 it would have been as big as NASCAR is nowin the US,with more international fame. Not huge, but very healthy
CART was the better series in terms of racing. The 05-06 Champcar was such a masterpiece of a machine, if a little ugly. The IRL cars of the time were pretty cool as well, but Dan Weldon's death kind of tainted it for me. Indycar seems to me to have fone back in the right direction. 2018 and 2019 were some of the absolute greatest seasons IMO. Those cars were sexy. The Aeroscreen kind of killed that, but the cars are still awesome.
Your final "would" question is probably the truth. Without the split, Indy would've ended up being insanely expensive. The split let the teams focus on what was actually popular (the month of May), which tracks were best for the show, and how the cars can be designed to keep speeds up but also be safe* and, most importantly, affordable. *Yes Dan Wheldon, Justin Wilson and Robert Wickens, but all three of those are freak accidents rather than the Krosnoff, Rodriguez and Moore ones.
"Without the split, Indy would've ended up being insanely expensive. " Racing teams will always spend as much money as they have. The only reason they don't spend much now (and many of the teams can't afford new chassis or new engines) is because Indycar is not popular enough to draw sponsorship at a higher level. Having the Indy 500 as the only high profile event is a *BIG* problem.
The real split was when CART split from USAC...everything that has happened since then is a direct result of that first disagreement because that's when "The Sars" and "The Race" first fell out...
I got talking about this in Jakecord about Porsche trying to build a carbon monocoque for CART then getting banned by Penske only for him to get one himself the next year. Which hilarious conflict of interests like that its honestly no wonder Indycar imploded like it did, Tony George was right on pretty much every issue he had except American drivers and wanting ovals and having the ladder system be sprint cars. I don't know that Indycar would be that much better off today or at least better off by 2008 if they don't split because it was a shitshow for a long time.
Would love to hear your thoughts/opinion on Vettel's apparent drop in form post blown-diffuser ban. I've always thought he wasn't the same driver after the regs changed, and that the specific characteristics associated with blown-diffuser style cars brought out the best of him. Could be complete coincidence, however.
The whole "Split" pretty much boiled down to both sides repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot till one fell.
No it was Tony George shooting CART in the chest, then himself in the foot repeatedly until one was dead and the other crippled
Ten toes, eleven bullets each.
Who will win?!?!
When the split was on, there was an interview in Racer magazine with Mario Andretti. On the topic of Formula One drivers, he was asked why there weren't drivers coming from IRL to F1. He answered, "well, there's a reason they're in the IRL."
1996 had a really bad grid, however from 2002 onwards It was much better
@@mattiasgarbi9470 Because 2002 was when CART was clearly no longer struggling but dying
I'm sure he didn't mention the time Michael Andretti went to F1. It wasn't a career highlight.
@@robertnewland8358 The original De Vries in my opinion
From a Brazilian perspective: CART was HUGE here in mid to late 90s. Races were broadcasted live by SBT, the second largest TV channel - and it happened at a time when sunday afternoon TV had a big impact on the Brazilian cultural zeitgeist, with the two main channels pushing the envelope harder and harder for ratings. It was fair to say that it rivaled F1 among the Brazilian public in the first years of the split, despite the fact that they couldn't call it "Indy" anymore and came up with the completely made-up name "Fórmula Mundial" (something like "Formula World"). It was a huge draw for Brazilian fans with Emerson Fittipaldi coming from two Indy 500 wins, a lot of great Brazilian drivers (de Ferran, Gugelmin, C. Fittipaldi, Castroneves, Kanaan, Ribeiro and our hero Roberto Moreno) and very good racing, especially after the death of Ayrton Senna. I remember the commentators even talking about rumours of Barrichello joining CART.
I believe Indy would never make it this big in Europe, regardless of the split, but had serious potential to establish itself in other markets like it did in Brazil for five or six years. The casual fans of the Senna era lost interest in motorsport. Hardcore fans eventually shifted their attention back to F1 with Rubens moving to Ferrari, but the deterioration of CART caused by the split was also a huge factor, especially not having the Indy 500 and losing Penske (along with de Ferran and Castroneves) to IRL. Live broadcasts were interrupted by 2000, and SBT began airing taped races around midnight, until their contract ended. The Bandeirantes channel (which was the first to televise Indycar in Brazil, before the split) picked up the rights for IRL since then, but their reach is way smaller and it was never the same. Perhaps if Indy had avoided the split, there would be enough pull to bring top F1 drivers after they retired from European racing, like it did with Fittipaldi and Mansell, and bring in some serious new talent on their prime, like the days when they could have peak Zanardi, Montoya, de Ferran and Moore on the same grid.
I don't know how much I buy the story about CART's popularity in Brazil. There were a lot of successful Brazilian drivers in the series, so when they finally attempted a race in Brazil, it was hyped to the skies, here in the US we were fed with a lot of talk about how big the race would be, and it turned out to be a flop. What did it run, two years? I watched it on TV. We'd always get the same story from CART, its fans, promoters, team owners and the TV announcers how popular CART was overseas, but except for Canada and for a few years in Australia, every time IndyCar has gone overseas it's been a failure. Some day we have to get our heads out of our asses and just admit that when it comes to this type of racing, everywhere it the world outside of the US, it's Formula One or nothing. People just aren't interested. I've been hearing this stuff about IndyCar's overseas popularity for 50 years and have never seen one bit of evidence that such popularity exists.
I agree, the only winners were F1 and NASCAR. It clearly was not worth it.
Mostly NASCAR in my opinion, F1 could/should have tried to return in the US earlier in hindsight.
F1 sucks... F1 is crap since 2010...
Another aspect where, in the early years, the IRL differed from CART was with the engine design: CART was with turbocharging; while Tony George's IRL went with what he defined as the low-cost and simplistic approach with a naturally aspirated engine by Oldsmobile.
Fast-forward to 2012: The engines are turbocharged powered.
So, the NTT IndyCar series became [what some would consider] version 2 of CART.
Some of my favourite memories as a kid was watching Schumacher vs. Alonso in the morning and Tracy vs. Bourdais in the afternoon. My dad was a CART fan and often talked about the split. I grew up watching Champ Car and I remember the reunification. It's flat out sad that it's practically back to where it started with a fraction of the original popularity and teams. I was always a Team Forsythe fan, and their livery was iconic!
CART had great cars, great tracks, and great drivers. IndyCar has an ancient spec chassis, interchangeable drivers named Scott, and Nashville. Still, since it's a series almost driven to death by selfishness, short-sightedness, and a hurty feelings man child, it's amazing it still exists.
The problem with American open wheel racing has always been the team owners and their different perspectives on what the sport is. The split was simply a manifestation of what has always been the real problem that being that it tries to be two things at once. At times it's good. Indycar is at home both on the streets of Long Beach and in an Iowa cornfield. But it is precisely that struggle between glitz and glamour and hard working oily hands engineering that is the issue. If you want glam and tech you watch F1. If you want to see a few good ol boys put together a big V8 while downing a few drinks you watch NASCAR. Indycar however has always had people on both sides of that spectrum trying to call the shots and in the end it ends up being one big compromise. In example it's harder to get a new car and rules changed in Indycar than F1 something that is completely confounding considering the leadership structures. I like Indycar but unless it finds a way to truly please everyone all around it will continue on as is.
You're spot-on calling how Indycar struggles to find a cohesive identity, but imho the fanbase is also pretty uninviting for how jaded and opinionated it is.
You get people putting it down for having just two engine makes, not realizing that it's a miracle one of them hasn't called it quits, and that the series has pretty decent parity without using outright BoP.
The real split came when the rich sports car dudes started to come into IndyCar in the 1960s. They were from a different social class from the traditional IndyCar world. Think Lance Georg Wilhelm Detlev Graf Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow vs. AJ Watson. One class was the international, beautiful people jet set, and the other was American farm boy mechanics. But to the fury of the jet set crew, most American race fans ignored the sports car world and preferred the dirt & asphalt oval racing championships that culminated every year at Indy. The big money was in IndyCar racing, so the sports car guys, failing to put their own sport over, took over IndyCar, destroyed the native American sport and replaced it with a watered down version of what prevailed in the Europe they preferred to their own country. The biggest effort to make sports car racing major league in the US was the Can-Am series, but when that went belly-up they moved into IndyCar and, with their greater wealth and higher social connections (important in gaining sponsorships) made it their sandbox and drove out all the people who made IndyCar the most popular motor sport in the US. And since that time, IndyCar had a slow but inevitable decline until NASCAR, which was a flea speck compared to Indianapolis as recently as the early 70s, far surpassed IndyCar, mainly by picking up all the fans that IndyCar dropve away and rejected as "not worthy".
I know a few people who were ardent IndyCar fans up until the demise of CART/ChampCar. They're still motorsport fans, but primarily IMSA/WEC and F1. The sport lost a lot of fans over the split and talent was diluted. And you're absolutely correct who the real winners in this are. I miss the heyday when you had Lola, Reynard, Swift, and Eagle chassis, along with Mercedes, Ford, Honda, and Toyota motors all competing at the same time. IndyCar, while it looks similar to CART is a lackluster imitation product.
None of what you see today is because of the 1996 stuff. The split had long been a fact prior to 1996, going back to 1979 or so. I'm not sure why your friends REALLY don't go now, but it's not something that happened 26 (or 44) years ago.
CART was a mainstream sport. In western Canada at the time, everyone knew it as a legit top sport. Even if they weren't fans, they knew it was there. That isn't true anymore.
Yeah, no recognizable sponsorship, spec cars that are incredibly dated, and a lack of the raw speed that CART had has really taken the series down several notches. It feels more like IRL with better drivers than CART.
@@jesseemullen thank the FIA and insurance companies for half of your rant, and thank the changing face of advertising budgets for the second half.
I was a big Indycar fan from the late 60s as well as Formula 1. Have not seen an Indy race since the split, knew none of the drivers or teams. By the time they made peace I was long gone.
Its ironic that IndyCar won out, yet has pretty much become CART, considering they mostly do road courses now.
Minus the beast mode engines!
And not so many american drivers
Penske becoming the new owner really solidified that.
@@LoganHunter82The drivers who were in the IRL were a third or fourth tier roster of racing drivers at best. The current drivers in Indycar are almost on a par with F1 drivers.
The only winner here was NASCAR
Another good split to look at would be the IMSA AMLS Grand-AM Split.
I remember when they announced the merger.....it was like seeing the Champ Car/IRL merger all over again
My biggest what if about the split, is what if Ecclestone had taken up CART's buyout offer back 1998.
Probably run it into the ground to eliminate the competition. 😅
@@AidanMillward But what if F1 and Indycar series did something like the endurance racing competitions and made their car regulations similar. Allowing for teams to race in both leagues, share tech & development, etc.
Okay I may just want the Indy 500 to be part of the F1 calendar because I am a nutter.
@Taurevanime it used to be part of the championship from 1950 until about 1960. But, because you had a championship that had the best x amount of results from x amount of races back then, there was no need for the European f1 teams to show up to indy in order to win the championship. I think only McLaren, who already have an indycar team, would do well at indy compared to other f1 teams because the other teams don't want or need the infrastructure to essentially build 2 separate cars for one specific race in the championship. So it'd be like the 1950s. No f1 team except McLaren would show up for the race.
@@Taurevanime I think Tony George "selling" the Indy 500 to F1 instead of creating IRL would have been an interesting what if.
Could have been a bigger blow to CART than the real-life ones? Would some teams jump to full-season F1 years only because of that race? Would CART- or USAC-based drivers allowed to compete as (pay) replacement drivers? Could the Indy 500 have changed some championship races? But also...
...if that happened, could that have been just a stunt: a negative ad against european drivers in ovals?
@@AidanMillwardlikely with Bernie, although I think it may have ended up as F3000/GP2/F2 USA, acting as a hyped up feeder series to drive US engagement in F1
My take is that Tony George wanted to bring back the halcyon days of his youth i.e. the 70's, when it was all American drivers contesting an all-oval series. The flaw in that logic, in my opinion, is that foreign drivers and road racing were already there, they're just easy to ignore because they were split off into a different series: Formula 5000. Sure, it wasn't as big as Indy, but it washed its own face and a lot of its drivers came from overseas (my preferred auto rag had a few articles last year detailing Aussie drivers trying their luck for the huge prize money available stateside). It's easy to overlook because it was run by the SCCA rather than USAC, but it was still an American open-wheel series that specialised in road and street courses; it had a fanbase, and if you put its schedule alongside the same from USAC for any given year, you get something that looks an awful lot like a latter-day CART calendar. And when it finally folded, it gifted CART a new blue-ribbon event in the Long Beach Grand Prix, and a new power team in Newman/Haas Racing. Food for thought.
I was at Long Beach when Pook was running F1 there. Still not a big fan of street circuits...
I wish more people knew about Formula 5000, and SCCA Formula A
I admit I didn't even know about the split until late 2002 when Dixon was contracted to move with Chip Ganassi to Indycar it was all rather confusing for someone who was only following US open wheel racing for one driver
It’s funny how Jeff Gordon raced in USAC and wanted to go to Indy but did a Buddy Baker Racing test at Rockingham in NASCAR cars and never looked back.
There's a lot of mythology about that Buddy baker story. Gordon never looked back because there was nothing to look back to. He tried to get into IndyCars and was laughed at and told to get lost. We know who laughed last.
I'm just imagining NASCAR executives in the 90's singing "NA NA NA NA HA HA HA HA" at Tony George because they got Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart even left the IRL for NASCAR.
one other x-factor in indycar's struggle to reclaim faim (other than the 500) is the dan wheldon crash. that was such a huge blow to the series and its effects are still felt today imo.
if that las vegas race in 2011 went off without a hitch or had little hiccups then indycar no doubt is in a completely different place today. where indycar is now is the same place it was just after reunification-- stagnated, only this time the cars are different and ovals aren't taking up half the schedule.
I agree. A lot of people underestimate how much that 2011 Las Vegas race tragedy changed the direction and format of Indycar by further reducing the amount of oval races and increasing road and street courses.
You gotta do one on the DTM! The fall of that series is unlike anything I've ever seen!
He already has
@christycullen2355 thanks! I gotta find that one!
which one, specifically? He did one on the DTM turned ITC, though I'm still tryin to wrap my head around how the rebooted DTM just ended up a GT3 class and a shell of what it once was. When you resemble the death knell of Super Touring and manage to somehow not even steady that out, then....there's absolutely something very very very wrong. BTCC rebounded after a while, DTM did not, though I'm not sure how sustainable a German focuse championship or series really is thoughf
@@jacekatalakis8316the reason why DTM found itself racing GT3s is that Class One cars were pointless, and the manufacturers were not interested. The GT500 class of Super GT managed to survive only because, for some reason, the manufacturers were (and are) interested. The sad truth is that there is no point in racing high-downforce prototypes that resemble touring cars and GT cars minus the somewhat exciting racing. Also, there was probably not enough interest from public. All this reasons are why DTM "died" and, in the meanwhile, NASCAR and the Supercars Championship thrive.
@@simoneburini4036 I don't know what world you're living in where either the NASCAR or Supercars championships are doing amazing right now.
Tony George wanted control over CART in the early 90’s. When he couldn’t get that he took his ball and went home. He spent hundreds of millions out of his family’s fortune to prop up the IRL for the 12 years it took for CART to eventually weaken and die. In the end he got what he wanted, a series that was morphing into CART 2.0 but with him in charge. For Tony George, the split was a great success - until he actually needed some of those millions back and sold out to Penske.
I would love to see Indycar open up to flyaway events in other countries again. I know it's going through its own problems, but just imagine Indycar at a track like Donnington in the UK or Interlagos in Brazil. I'm sure Australia still has enough goodwill to put something together there as well.
I think we're underestimating the 'role' Bernie played during The Split. Without it, I don't think Formula One would've returned to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and as a consequence there won't be a boom in the popularity of F1 in the United States (which was frozen for a while - thanks 2005 USGP). For Bernie, The Split happened at the right place, at the right time - he convinced Tony George to pour Millions of $$$ into developing an infield road course (which still uses portion of the oval), while delivering a serious blow to CART (F1's chief rival in the 90's) in the process. I'd say that the France family also had some behind the scenes dealings with TG to wound CART.
TG brought NASCAR to the Brickyard in '94, which definitely didn't help CART grow at all.
Tony made a ton of money off the Brickyard 400, likely more than he made off of F1; because unlike Bernie, NASCAR doesn't rape and pillage the host in sanctioning fees.
Bernie alledegedly played both sides. He gave money to TG at the start of the split and started covertly investing in Champcar around 03-05 to keep the IRL and Champcar fighting as long as possible.
the split sent open wheel racing in north america back 30 years! we are just getting it back now
If it sent it back thirty years, we would have had what USAC Championship Racing was all about. The "big race" along with the the lesser known races like Milwaukee, Phoenix, etc. Also, the dirt cars, which is where the Silver Crown Series came from.
That was when you had America drivers who could match anyone, because they were doing it. F1 wasn't the draw for North American drivers, because they didn't believe, and rightfully so, that travelling all over God's green earth could get them anything better than what they had at home.
I was on the CART/Champcar as it was on Motors TV back in the day when I was exploring racing outside F1. I still think it was a better product, but it needed to be better managed: The engine rules issues, Cancelled races, the stupid floatation and then the problems with Broadcast dealing. It majorly harmed the sport and was not worth it, and ironically, the series has turned to BTEC cart. Even now, you can see the worry over another split that has stopped progress over the new chassis, the failure to get a 3rd engine and the lack of balance in the schedule. If IndyCar could get over this, there is such a growth potential, excaully as diehard F1 Fans dropout.
There is a book ‘Indy Split’ that tells the story and was a great read when I finished it earlier this year.
Was not worth it!
Yes, the book is Indy Split by John Oreovicz. It’s a well done in depth review. And yes, it was not worth it.
Yeah, it is a great book. I didn't realise how much the original USAC spilt helped to course the 90's split.
@@MrmayhembscYes. There was a long history.
The Split put the sport back decades and IndyCar has been trapped in stagnation since the reunification
They're afraid to take calculated risks while F1 and NASCAR have made them pay off
What risks ? They are 10+ years behind and its a long road to building it back up.
@mvd4436 risk like adding 1 race to the schedule.
Adding an 18th race to schedule is considered too risky despite strong ticket sales in the last couple of years.
Are kidding me? F1? F1 is boring af. I am German and I dont watch this crap since 2010... IndyCar is superior to F1! In so many ways!!!
Looks, fights, championship, way more spectacular, every year different champs, no 100 race win streaks...
What F1 are you watching? The one from the 90s? Or 80s? Cant be the current running. There was one season since 2010 in which you couldnt say in the first race, who will win the championship! And you call that taking calculated risks and make them paying off? R U KIDDING ME??? xD They hardly race when its raining... Pays off a lot... Really had to laugh....
I dunno about NASCAR, but on F1 you are just wrong...
@chrisbee9643 I think he's referring to the television ratings and the attendance of F1; not necessarily the racing product.
@@johnthefalcon2903 because they majority is getting crazier, doesnt mean the product has gotten better... I dont care what the attendence is! The large the attendence the more boring are the events...
I was there. It was bitter. I know stories that most don't know, and gotta tell you it was worse than most know. Having said that, nothing that limits IndyCar today is due to that split. BTW, the split started in 1978, kinda reunified in 1982-ish, and then broke open again in 1996.
I remember this and as an Al Unser, Jr. fan I didn't understand why my favorite guy wasn't on TV anymore. So I switched to NASCAR and picked up the Jeff Gordon bandwagon. I didn't even give open wheel another thought until they started showing abbreviated versions on CZcams a few years ago.
When I read Oreowicz’s book “Indy Split”, I had the same feeling that the main characters in Burn After Reading came to at the end of the movie.
“So what’d we learn?’
‘Ahhh, don’t do that?”
From the IRL side, Tony had good intentions, but he had two things not going right, timing (as Aiden and Robin Miller pointed out) and advisors that either didn’t have a clue about building a racing series or they were ego maniacs.
If Tony did this in ‘88-90, it might have worked. There was a lot of in-fighting with CART at the time. It might have panned out ok then.
American Open Wheel has a strange history, especially in the last 50 years. NASCARMAN History did a great series on The Split that gets into the origins of how CART was formed to today. Well worth a watch there.
I hated the IRL. The first nail was seeing Penske leave and the final nail in the coffin was Ganassi. I went to an IRL Indy 500 and it was filled by hasbeens and drivers not good enough for Indycar. It was as exciting as getting poison oak.
It's funny how Tony George won & immediately gets replaced. What this current Indycar product needs to happen is a unbelievable rivalry that catches up with Nascar
I heard that Bill France Jr. gave Tony George the idea for the IRL at the 1994 Brickyard 400. Considering that NASCAR reaped the benefits of the open-wheel war, I'd say that it's plausible.
Tony George looked to the France family for business advice....it was at the behest of Mr. France that the Indy Racing League move away from turbocharged engines to naturally aspirated V8s "run what ya brung" from 1997-2001. If you look up video from Montoya's first Indy 500 win, the cars sound like stock cars.
I think Tony George already was making threats as early as 1992 and got more aggressive by pre season 1994...Paul Page was talking about Tony George creating the Indy Racing League during the Surfer's Paradise broadcast.
Here is my perspective, as a American motorsports fan, whose favorite series
has been IndyCar, under all its names, for 50+ years. When USAC controlled the
series, it was the Indy 500 and a bunch of low attended, barely broadcast oval
support races. The team owners formed CART, added street and road courses and
made the series as popular or more popular than the 500. The mistake made was not
giving Tony George a place at the table for power and money. The owners should
have realized that the Indy 500 was the crown jewel and George controlled that.
The split certainly hurt the sport and all of those involved. George spent so
much money securing the IRL that the family eventually rebelled against him and
he lost the legacy property left by his grandparents. I'm sure the split helped NASCAR, but it would have become popular with the rubbing is racing" crowd anyway, after the 1979 Daytona race and fight. And the only benefit for F1 was that IndyCar would no longer be a threat to it internationally. F1 was never a draw in the US until the recent DTS driven popularity. IndyCar has better racing that F1 and NASCAR, but will likely never get back to where it could have been.
tbh. this channel deserves more love. quality is constantly raising.
I mean we are basically now where CART was before the split. Just much less popular. So yeah it wasn't really worth it.
Let's see...Tony George was mad that Roger Penske and friends had taken Indy car racing as a whole away from his family's control, that there were too many right turns, that short track oval racers didn't have a viable career path that led to the Indy 500 because their lack of road racing experience made them a liability for the rest of the championship, that the engine manufacturers held too much sway because of lease arrangements, and that there were too many F1 rejects on the grid. So he solved this by chasing away all the sponsors and fans, and then sold his broken handiwork to Roger Penske, who now owns a series that looks exactly like the one he was angry about, except with less money because he chased away all the sponsors and fans and the efforts to claw them back have been moderately successful but extremely slow-going.
Tony George's mistake was that his effort was half-assed. He threw the CART guys out and then just copied their series. Of course the same type drivers were going to filter back into the IRL as were filling the grid in CART because the cars in both series favored the same type drivers. What he should have done is built an entirely new car, maybe off the Super Modified model, and made those the new IRL car. That would have drawn both the circle track drivers and fans back to IndyCar. Instead he just built a cheaper Euro-Formula car which favored Euro-Formula drivers who weren't good enough for F1 or even CART. And that's what the IRL still is today. The sport, at that point, needed a real revolution and Tony George had to bring in something that was genuinely new, but he didn't have the guts for it and that doomed the IRL from the beginning.
I followed the IRL from the beginning and remember going into the first race, none of the IRL team owners wanted to give Tony Stewart a ride. There was a wait & see attitude amongst us fans who were willing to give the IRL a chance because we hated what IndyCar had become--a second rate Formula One. There was practically a revolt on the CompuServe Racing Forum (the top online racing site at that time) when it seemed that Tony Stewart, who was exactly the type driver the IRL was supposedly created for, wasn't going to get a seat. Tony George had to beg John Menard to give him his third car to get Stewart in the field in order to keep the few fans he had from fleeing before their first race was even run. And we fans knew, from that point, that outside of AJ Foyt, the IRL team owners were basically the same bunch of sports car dude-bros who ran CART, only they were the ones who couldn't cut it in CART, and the IRL was going to be more of the same thing, only at a lower level. What a shit show!
I don't really understand the issue very well, and don't really 'get' North American motorsport, but it seems to me that all that matters to the sponsors and the fans is the Indy 500, which isn't a strong basis for anything that could be expensive and sustainable. An interesting question might be, would F1 today look any different from the current IRL if the only race that anyone actually cared about or payed attention to was Monaco?
Indy is/was the party. You have hard-core IndyCar fans that travel like those who go to F1 races, wherever they are. Then you have (mostly) dirt track open-wheel fans, which is where old USAC Championship style cars came from, that lived with the belief that if you can go to only one race? Then Indy it is. Then you have the kids that just love it for the noise and constant sensory overload. Then those who want to be seen by those that "matter."
Well the WEC is a series that is entirely dominated by Le Mans, winning the WEC is worth less in both marketing and cachet than winning the 24h.
@@steruss9481 That's true, and I suppose you can see some issues that arise from that, such as Toyota being effectively the only team in Hypercar for a long time, or the collapse of Group C and so on. I love the WEC, and think it's some of the best racing out there, but the dominance of Le Mans does have it's consequences, and suspect the same is true for Indy car vis a vis the Indy500
While French, I loved watching CART races on Eurosport, from Nigel Mansell's move across the Pond, until about 1997, I'd say. I had zero interest in any oval race but the Indy 500, so I avoided almost all but 1/year, thus IRL being just like Nascar to me: 100% pure unadulterated American Boredom. Smaller ovals felt like the acme of this senselessness.
Having these 2 championships essentially made me less interested in CART overall, on top of great F1 competition between 1997 and 2000, which is a shame, considering I was happy about knowing J. Villeneuve's previous endeavours when he got into F1, or seeing some backmarker names reappear on the other side of the Atlantic.
What T. Georges did was sad, and indeed looks like an awful loss of time and money. How he could even lose his grip on his own sham of a series after it eventually won out is unfathomable to me.
The whole thing was like that episode of Star Trek where Kirk gets split into two people by a malfunctioning transporter. Each separate Kirk (or AOWR series) was unbalanced and could only be put right by putting the two back together.
AOWR was basically ruined for several years by a few rich, egotistical men for reasons that amount to nothing more than hubris. And it'll never quite find its way back again...
Interesting video. I’d say its more of a merger right now with the low cost approach of IRL alongside CARTS variety. Another ideas would be: Could GT1 have been saved?
Having 2 races at the IMS is also... interesting. Like imagine if F1 decided to go to Monaco twice in one season. I like IndyCar and I appreciate how competitive and fun the races can be, but i feel like there needs to be some sort of shake up to get more people interested.
The reason we have two IMS Road Course races was originally for COVID reasons, bit afterwards NBC, who owns the IndyCar rights and the last half of the NASCAR season, wanted a doubleheader weekend someplace and Roger Penske volunteered.
Otherwise the 2nd IMS race would have been dropped.
@@danielhenderson8316 yeah it's not a bad idea, and I do think the whole weekend as a double header with NASCAR is fun, it just feels a little bit unimaginative
@@marcellakilgarriff I wish they'd do the Doubleheader at some place like Michigan, but when NBC stops caring is when the 2nd race stops.
I remember thinking for years before the start of the IRL that CART was getting too far from oval racing, and the grassroots American open wheel racers really didn't have a chance. Jeff Gordon grew up wanting to race Indy cars, but before that opportunity had a chance to happen, he got picked up by Bill Davis to run in the NASCAR Busch Grand National Series...where he was noticed by Rick Hendrick, and the rest is history. Tony George didn't want to lose out on another driver like that, so I completely understand the intentions behind what he did. I just thought he should've tried to make changes within the existing series, instead of breaking off to start a competing series. Being the president of IMS, he obviously carried a lot of weight.
From the first IRL race at Disney World, I was a little uneasy about the idea of whole new series. Things like the 25-8 rule, the U.S. 500, and then fans getting killed by flying debris at Michigan and Charlotte, and the two series constantly shooting themselves in the foot didn't help.
And the big winner in the whole thing? NASCAR, which grew a lot bigger, faster than it would have if there had been competition from a healthy Indy car series.
Now it's been fifteen years since the end of The Split...and we're back to where we were with CART in 1995: An American open-wheel series with too-few oval races. But while it might not quite have the stature that CART did in 1995, I think it's in a better place than it was, say, five years ago. And also, NASCAR is not exactly going gangbusters these days.
Irony is that the IRL was created to grab talent like Tony Stewart, arguably the greatest all-around driver in the last 30 years. However, he won a title then moved straight to Nascar. Then guys like Hornish, Franchitti, Pruett, Yeley, Robby Gordon, etc chose to leave for NASCAR (with pretty bad results).
In the end, George was right about two things. 1. Cost control. He was ahead of the game in that regard. 2. Safety. Considering his drive and determination led the way of many safety creations and institutions.
AJ Allmendinger was in Champ Cars and when he won a couple of races he couldn't get to NASCAR fast enough. There was no room for American drivers in CART or the IRL in those days and there aren't many now. It's a European series grafted onto the US racing scene.
@@RRaquellowell you can try to get the best teams and drivers, or to get american teams and drivers. You can't get both.
@@23GreyFox IndyCar is supposed to be a national championship, not a world championship. Since it's supposed to be the national championship open wheel racing series, it should reflect what open wheel racing is in the country where the series exists. It does not. US open wheel racing is what you see in USAC or World of Outlaws or other similar series. It is not what you see in IndyCar, which is why there are so few American drivers in IndyCar and so few people follow IndyCar in the US, especially as compared to the days when IndyCars reflected what American racing was, down to it grass roots level, and produced the type of racing American fans want to see.
Instead you have it as a top level national championship with no legitimate supporting series underneath to produce drivers for that form of racing, which is why drivers have to be imported. It's as if you had the whole structure of youth and development baseball from Little League up to college and when players got to the Major Leagues they had to play cricket. They'd have to import players to play that too.
@@RRaquello Well that will only work after a complete rebuild of the series. Most Indy teams are not interested in oval racing. I'm also not sure if a open wheel and oval only racing series would work so well in the US. Most American racing fans love speed and crashes.
Maybe that's also why Rally events don't exist in the US. What US fans want and fans in the rest of the world are total opposites.
@@23GreyFox I think a rebuild of the series is what's needed, but it can't happen now. It's too late. This is where Tony George was a real shmuck. He could have returned the sports to its proper roots when he started the whole IRL thing, but he didn't have the guts to take such a gamble. Instead he just produced a watered-down CART, which alienated the CART fans but didn't produce the type of racing wanted by the fan base he was trying to reach. A typical half-assed effort.
I was a big IndyCar fan in the '90s, but like many American motorsports fans, the split eventually made me lost touch with the series. Also, NASCAR doesn't do a whole lot for me (I don't disrespect NASCAR or its drivers, they are the best in the world at racing "stock" cars on ovals, it's just not my thing), so I kind of lost touch with motorsport in general until the 2010s when it started to be easier to follow F1 in the USA. Now in the last few years, I am back into IndyCar as well and feel that their races are often more entertaining than F1, but the split definitely wasn't close to worth it. The schedule is basically the same as before and instead of being the preeminent American motorsport series, NASCAR is about 4x more popular. NASCAR may have passed it anyway, but I imagine that if the split didn't happen it would be much closer.
I think this was the best era in Motorsports like all around. Too bad I was 3 and couldn’t watch it🤣
nice video, the whole split thing does seem like a waste of time consoidereing how mauch dammge it caused, I jsut glad it happened pre social media because in this social media era i imagine it would be way worse
Love this format, Aidan, keep it up!
I was a massive CART/Champ Car fan. Particularly Justin Wilson. (There's a talent who never quite got the car needed to win championships IMHO. Don't argue, I won't like it 😝) What _really_ p'd me off was the loss of CC from Eurosport and Indycar going behind the Sky sports "paywall". I'll never forgive George for that. If CC or CART (the name didn't matter) had continued its success, maybe we would still have Justin around.
It's always the Poison Dwarf who wins out, isn't it? Did he find a magic lamp with a genie inside it? Is _he_ a genie? Who knows!
I was a big Justin Wilson fan too, and saw his first win in Toronto, sitting in the packed grandstand just above his pit box. He had a bright future, and deserved so much more success.
I’m sure that champcar would have folded in 2008 if it wasn’t for the re-merger. They were down to 17 cars with walker making noises of pulling their 2 cars. But irl would also have been down to 17 cars until it suddenly went up to about 28, falling down to low 20s within a few years. Cart was great, though Indycar today is a fair bit safer.
Its amazing when something is going places, people have a habit of pulling the rug out from beneath their feet
Very sad is my conclusion :(
I’ve been into F1 since I was a kid, but I’m ashamed to admit that all I knew about Indy500 was J Villeneuve & Montoya had come from that weird oval racing they did in the USA.
However I’ve got properly into it since Alonso tried it, now I’m as addicted to Indycar as I am to F1. I think Indycar has become a LOT more popular in the UK since it’s been shown on the SkyF1 channel here. Although many of my F1 fwends still won’t watch Indycar 😂
That pisses me off when you see f1 CZcams guys going NO F1 fOr FOuR WEEkS HOw wIlL I COpE??????
There’s loads more to watch.
@@AidanMillward 100% agree
Not sure if its rose coloured glasses but I still vividly remember as a kid, crossing the pedestrian bridge over Lakeshore Drive at the Molson Indy in Toronto. Positioned just as the cars went into 6th gear, shaking the bridge. CART was better. The absurdity of them going 230+MPH average at Michigan in the mid 90's. Great now I have to go play Formula USA Gen2 in AMS2
It was weird growing up in the American South during the split. IndyCar went from something that was must see TV, to 2 also-ran series, almost overnight, while NASCAR, already the preferred racing series in the region, became King, but started making choices that brought it to its peak but also laid the foundation for its slow decline.
Its also weird to think about what might have happened to Tony Stewart if it weren't for the split - he got a chance in the IRL because of The Split, but The Split made his defection to NASCAR inevitable. Would he have still broken through if The Split didn't happen? If he didn't, would he have been recruited to NASCAR from the Sprint Car ranks like Jeff Gordon was? If he did break through into IndyCar, would he have still made the jump to NASCAR? Would JGR be the powerhouse team it is today without him driving for them during the early 2000's?
Minor "what if" if Tony Stewart had success in a unified CART: what if he got called to F1?
@@mattiasgarbi9470 I'm not sure the universe could've handled Smoke and The Michael or Alonso on the grid at the same time, especially if Tony Stewart was in a competitive car. We would've had fist fights on the podium. Can you imagine a Tony Stewart helmet throw at Michael Schumacher after being wrecked out for the championship? It would have been Senna v. Prost on steroids.
I got an issue that IndyCar got a more complex history... My answer is no it didn't worth it, but I also think it was hard to avoid because of a mix of history, economics, and different wants. Basically, both series were stuck in an economic bubble.
The split was inevitable the day Jack Brabham showed up at Indianapolis with his Cooper-Coventry-Climax Special. That was 1961. Opposing and irreconcilable forces were set in motion that took 30 years to completely unravel IndyCar.
@@RRaquello Well, between USAC wanted to keep budget low and keep the Indy 500 as the big show. The SCCA wanting Formula 5000 and the Can-am to work. IMCA which weirdly enough had some influence up to the late 1950s. F1 and Nascar wanting the audience... It was a hard place to be for Cart.
However, what didn't help was the budgets exploding in the 1980s with Cosworth and Chevrolet finally driving out the Offy (last Offy raced in 1983) (albeit, Pontiac did show up in 1984, it was mostly all Cosworth and Ilmor Chevy by that point, some Buick).
USAC mismanagement and bad relationship with the teams didn't help in the late 1970s and early 2000 (they were officiating IRL for a little while).
And the dotcom bubble also didn't help because a lot of people thought that money grow on trees (both Cart and IRL are guilty on that one).
Basically, the split "could have been an email" about cost reduction and technical rules.
I read that Bill France told George that he didn't need those team owners and should go his own way. France put him up to it, they created the useless Brickyard race thus diminishing Indy itself never minding the series, and George's lost leverage, and NASCAR soared.
Loved CART from the split up until about 2002 after which the IRL was my thing. I actually still really miss those IRL seasons when most of the races were on ovals.
As an American who was heavily into racing during this time period I can say that it was not only not worth it, but the worst thing that ever happened in the history of American racing for many reasons. You touched on CART having the best of both worlds with ovals and road courses and that's what made it enjoyable to watch. Trying to turn Indy cars into oval racers just made it a NASCAR knock off series. Part of the appeal of NASCAR is "Rubbing is racing". Those closed wheel stock cars can get in close and go 2 to 3 wide in corners. Open wheel cars can't do that. It's fun to watch an oval race once in a while, but watching people turn left for 4 hours gets boring and without the tension of being on the razors edge of a crash because the cars can actually touch, it's not something that many people want to watch on a steady basis.
The TV aspect was the HUGE nail in the coffin. At the time there were tiers of television. Network television had the larger audience and the most money. Anything on cable was thought of as second tier. CART cars were on Network TV every week. NASCAR was on Network TV for the Daytona 500 and then it was back to cable. Not only back to cable but depending on what race it was, it could have been on any of 3 different networks. NASCAR wasn't even able to pull off a stable TV deal on a cable network at the time.
As you pointed out NASCAR was the big winner in America. Dale Earnhardt was rising to dominance at this time so the timing was also fortuitous. TBH it's the worst time to be a racing fan in America right now. NASCAR is killing itself with gimmicks, and even before that happened most race fans don't want to watch cars turn left for 4 hours. Oval racing is fun to watch at your local track. When you can go there and smell the burning rubber and racing fuel. Being a part of the experience is exciting. It makes you appreciate it on a larger scale. Short tracks are closing down all over the country and NASCAR runs fewer short track races as the years go by. Honestly, those are the most exciting races to watch. Super speedways are boring. Restrictor plates just turn it into an artificially competitive race that relies too heavily on drafting and without the restrictor plates a few cars take off and put literal one mile leads on the next pack. It goes from over crowded racing with restrictor plates to the polar opposite without them. CART still hasn't recovered from this and as fun as IMSA can be, watching 4 different classes race for a certain period of time with 4 different winners take a lot of the excitement out of it. There just isn't anything close to what CART was before this happened and I don't see how American racing will ever recover. Honestly, I preferred pre-split CART to F1. There was a lot less politics and the cheating was almost unheard of. In F1 it isn't even a question of "Did someone cheat this year?" but "Who cheated this year and how much of an advantage did they gain?" Between the cheating and having to stay up until 3 AM on a Sunday to watch a race I can't really get into F1. I really want to enjoy racing again. There just isn't anything available to me that scratches the itch of what CART used to be. The few times a year that I can catch a race on TV it's so overloaded with commercials that I can't even sit through the half way mark of the race.
Indy cars WERE oval track cars. They were once ONLY oval track cars. Cars that ran pavement AND dirt. Jack Brabham and Colin Chapman changed what pavement Indy cars became. If it wasn't for that, Indy cars would likely still be oval track cars, but more in the line of Super Modified cars. (Not NASCAR pavement modifieds. Those are a whole different beast.)
1990’s Cart was absolutely incredible amazing car’s circuits & drivers. I just watch indycar now thinking we need an extra 150hp & a touch more downforce
The thing Tony George failed to understand was that the reason CART was as popular as it was at that point was defo because of the international talent, especially the F1 stars. Mansell brought in so many British and F1 fans, that it actually became a thing over here in the UK. Before that people pretty much only knew the Indy 500, not that there was a whole championship attached to it.
And making IRL ovals only alienated a lot of those fans as lets face it, how many times have you heard F1 fans or whatever complain about oval racing that it "takes no skill and all you are doing is turning left all the time"? That goes for NASCAR as well.
The split hurt both series. While IRL from the outside looks like the winner, it really wasn't. Lets not forget that George was pretty much ousted by his sisters from Indiapolis Speedway due to spending so much of the family money, although if you believe Tony (which I dont) he quit.
Tony George really is the reason the popularity of open wheel racing tanked in the USA until F1 started to get a foothold in recent years.
A few things....
1. Outside of the Indy 500, CART had most of the circuits that were a draw and popular with fans--which happened to be primarily road/street courses....the promoters and infrastructure were already turn key when the merger happened in 2008. Many of the oval tracks were owned by the France family (or managed by their NASCAR underlings) which as an aside why IRL used NASCAR sounding naturally aspirated V8s from 1997-2001...TG (Tony George) took his business decisions to the France family as he had few to no allies in American Open Wheel Racing...only until the IRL became the low cost lifeboat when Ganassi and Penske left CART after 2002....also part of the deal was to open up the series to a more diverse calendar regarding circuits....IRL adding St Pete in 2005 with mostly oval racers ahead of the merger. Furthermore, a handful of tracks that came from CART were all under the stable of Green Savoree Promotions....they still run the races at St Pete, Toronto, Portland and one or two more. The IRL was better at cutting costs than CART..even at the expense of being the least sexy option of American Open Wheel Racing (AOWR)
2. The Indy Racing League/IRL (now IndyCar) in 2002 started to pool prize money purses and give lump sum payments at the end of the year to the top 22 entrants...rather than give paltry sums after every event...this was paid for by Indy 500 profits which helped keep costs down for owners initially...this was called the Leaders Circle...of which Andretti/Green (now Andretti Autosport) was grandfathered in to have 4 guaranteed entrants eligible for a Leaders Circle payout at the outset of the program whereas every other team only was eligible for 3 (presuming they all made the top 22 for the year)...Teams like Ganassi and Penske only have 3 entries eligible since they joined the LC program after it began. So even if all 4 current Ganassi entries (as of 2023) finish inside the top 22 in points...only 3 of them are eligible...based on which entered car joined the program first? (Not sure here).
3. The IRL for many reasons good and bad had come up with 2 cost-effective enough chassis suppliers in Dallara, with its Indy Racing-05 (aka IR-05) and Panoz (G-Force) platforms. CART was hellbent on throwing money they didn't have to the fire every year for development into oblivion..... "cheapness" (let's call it extreme frugality) led to why IndyCar didn't get paddle shifting on its cars until 2008...again when they merged....it should be noted that the Panoz/G-Force chassis barely survived into the merger when it stopped being competitive.
Admittedly I'm a short tracker, a USAC homer if you will. I spend my Saturday nights turning wrenches on a Sprint Car. My favorite 500 of the last 25 years was 2016 because my friend, a home grown sprint car kid, got to lead the 500 and I was there to see it. I have always loved Indy car because of the speedway and its history. CART made me appreciate road racing in ways that F1 or Sportscars never could. That said, the theory of what TG was trying to do was fabulous... I was a huge IRL fan because of one simple fact.... The guys that I watched at Terre Haute, or Manzanita, or Kokomo, or Duquoin would get a shot at the Speedway. Tony Stewart, Billy Boat, Ed Carpenter, Brian Tyler, these guys were my heroes. I will never forget standing on the pit road fence on Pole day in 97' astonished I was going to get to see Tony, and Billy in good rides for the 500. That was the purpose of it all. And then it went this direction, because of guys like Ganassi and Penske. Hence why I cant stand either. Penske was at the heart of the CART/ USAC split with Pat Patrick and Dan Gurney in 78/79'. Him and Patrick were at the heart of the dirt miles falling off the Championship trail in 70'. Tony George was 100% correct in understanding that the popularity of CART had a bubble. That is part of why NASCAR surpassed it, because once it emerged from being a regional series and guys like Tim Richmond, Kenny Schrader, the Bodines, Jeff Gordon etc became stars it had the drivers that your short trackers grew up watching and wanting to be. Jim Bob Dirtguy didnt know or care about Sebastian Bourdais, or Jan Magnussen. The fight limited TG's ability to create American Superstars and so most of them went NASCAR racing because thats where the money was, because even if they had their heart set on Indy a guy like Penske was never going to hire a short tracker. Last guy to sit in a Penske seat that had run a sprint car was Al Jr.
If a short track guy is fast, e.g., as fast or faster than Power and Newgarden, then why wouldn't Penske hire him? Penske even hired Scott McLaughlin who was a touring car driver from Australia/New Zealand with no open wheel experience at all.
Was your friend Bryan Clauson? He was exactly the kind of driver TG wanted to race in his series, but as I'm sure you know, he drove more NASCAR Nationwide races than IndyCar, and would have probably ended up with a full time ride in the main NASCAR series. I'm very sorry he is no longer with us.
@@OboeCanAm yes BC is who I was referencing. A wheelman of the highest order that if timing had been slightly different I fully believe would be racing on Sundays. That said he was the last of us shortrackers to get to the Speedway for the foreseeable future. It's still the greatest race in the world.. Just missing a few deserving wheelmen
IRL was rough.
I was young when the split happened so my opinions have some degree of hignsight.
I was more of a CART fan.
Those indycar chassis' were kinda pigs. cheaper than CART but lacking the WOW factor.
The current indycar universe is all about cost containment and equalization. Unlike F1, where a seat in a Minardi (uh Toro Rosso, sorry honey badger) gets you to call 13th place a win, the Indycar Dallaras are at least somewhat equal and you get a picture of driver (and team) ability. Call it Spec Miata if you must but it's kinda working.
You can’t even look at it and say “well at least Tony George got control from a business standpoint“ because, while he did, he got control of something that was probably 25% as valuable as it was before.
I also agree with you that the CART business model was unsustainable in the mid 90s, but I wonder if they would have instead wound up where they are now, simply under a third-party sanctioning
They would have ended up more like F1 is today with cost cutting measures, but still retain most of the popularity of the sport (along with Alex Zanardi and Greg Moore running the Indy 500 like they should have).
@@danielhenderson8316 Exactly, CART would have ridden the tobacco wave (even more so after f1 went0 away from it) and slowly transitioned to cost cutting and at the worst point would have been like today's indycar. Rather than losing boatloads of projected revenue, the popularity of US open wheelers tanking and desperately using gimmicks and overseas attempts to stay afloat.
TG ruined US open wheel financially,popularity wise and as a product just because of his ego to "beat" CART
Put it this way, I watch more old CART races from the 80s here on YT than current whatever it's called.
It had to be better for the few years it existed . . . until the money ran out. CART took the best of everything when they started. The only thing they didn't have were the titled events and a good business plan. The inmates wanted to run their own asylum, and it was good. That is, until the weight of their own monster crushed them.
@@DDS029Except the money only ran out because of greedy selfish Tony George. And him being willing to ruin the whole scene to beat CART by losing mountains of money to undercut sponsorships and using crapwagons that were cheap and the indy 500 to entice teams.
Great business, if business meant a less profitable, worse product monopoly with near zero international interest. It seemed Tony was more interested in putting CART out of business than the success of us open wheel racing
Nice vid. One objection since I don't want people to get a wrong idea of the history is how NASCAR blew up in popularity. Yes Gordon and Earnhardt were factors but I think it was a dozen factors. It wasn't something you can point to one or two things to explain its success.
It's not like F1 where two rivals will finish on the podium almost every race. Even in Gordon's incredibly dominant season he only won 30% of races, and he was getting booed massively for it because it was so extremely unusual and the southerners didn't like him.
NASCAR had at least a dozen really popular drivers at the time, the racing was much more exciting than F1 IRL Cart etc, the TV coverage was incredibly good.. think like F1 now vs F1 much worse tv in the 90s, NASCAR TV in the 90s was as quality as f1 today. Plus it was basically every Sunday afternoon which makes for a consistent viewing experience.
Speaking as someone who watched NASCAR, F1, and cart at the time, and mostly just F1 now
While I enjoy the video there were a couple things as a life long indycar fan I'd like to point out.
It was less TG wanted to make it all American but rather return it to its roots. Indycar was always an oval series. Road and street courses didn't become more prevalent till the mid 80s. He saw alot of indy talent being farmed out to f1 and f1 teams using cart for their talent and it didn't sit as well that the massive amount of drivers on the former usac ladder weren't getting a shot anymore, where the vast majority of great indycar drivers used to come from. He didn't want indycar to be part of the F1 ladder.
The other was costs. like you said cart was very expensive and even in the pre 9/11 crash there was the mid 90s crash that lead to gt1 racing replacing protypes. Cart felt that and really one of the few sports to escape it was nascar since they were in their period of record growth. They had come to run at Indy when only grumbling about a potential split were happening. NASCAR would have continued it's rise in popularity because it had been set in motion by the 1st usac Cart split decades earlier when big tobacco went to nascar over indycar.
While 100% the split wasn't worth it, IRL was a bit more forward thinking about costs and saftey for drivers while cart was living of a car they couldn't sustain. There is stuff I left out too but I feel it's hard to look at the split as a casual fan because it's roots go back to the 70s and there are so many twists and turns to it. Sorry for the Ted talk wall of text.
even though im mostly a nascar fan i like indycar and grew up with both the merger thing flew over my head when i was a kid then when i was older and looked at everything i could find about the split it just seemed silly and hurt both sports even though indycar won you can still feel the damage from it
S1apSh0es put it pretty bluntly early in his video "Is NASCAR Heading For a Split?"; "if it wasn't for the Indy 500 raking in hundreds of millions every year, that series would have folded years ago". Modern IndyCar is fun to watch and popular with drivers and hardcore fans, but the lingering after-effects like the more limited schedule, lost sponsorships and TV ratings, and less manufacturer interest make it more alternative than mainstream compared to NASCAR and F1.
I did a video on that whole thing as well. Indycar is hurting it’s growth by putting its eggs entirely into the Indy 500 basket and having the other events to just justify a series.
@@AidanMillwardIs the WEC killing it's growth with Le Mans?
@@AidanMillward Other than the Indy 500, the most successful events they have are the street races, which have huge investor backing, and Iowa, which the HyVee regional grocery store chain in the Midwest promotes heavily, this year with a concert headlined by Ed Sheeran and the Zac Brown Band. Any other place that doesn't have that level of support is left out. I live in the Northeast and had to travel to St. Pete to see my first IndyCar race since we lost Pocono due to safety and also Richmond to the pandemic and lack of sponsorship. IndyCar lost so much of their audience during the Split era to their competition, and it'll be even harder to claw back now with sports as a whole losing audience and advertising share to other forms of entertainment.
This is one of those rare topics where I genuinely don't have an opinion and am just happy to receive an educate on something I know nothing about 😅
"CART was at the height of its power and popularity. Okay, it was never going to reach the global status of formula one..."
What exactly do you base that assumption on?
In terms of global TV viewers, CART was only slightly lower than F1 when it came to regular races, while the Indy 500 was the most watched one-day sporting event in the world, even clearly surpassing the super bowl. And while F1's numbers were dropping after the death of Senna and the retirements of Prost, Piquet and Mansell, CART's global TV numbers were constantly rising.
Sure, in Europe it only had a small (but growing) fan base that was nowhere near the level of popularity F1 had at the time. But vice versa F1 had an even smaller (and shrinking) fan base in the US, where CART was absolutely massive in popularity.
In other markets such as south america, japan and australia both championships were almost equal, with CART experiencing faster growth numbers.
CART had higher sponsor income, which allowed them to pay higher driver salaries. Car manufacturers spent more money on the development of their CART/Indy engines then they did on their F1 programs. And of course for several years there were more former F1 world champions participating in CART than in F1 itself. That does not even include Senna, who was also thinking about moving to CARTdue to the massive paycheck he could have earned over there.
CART had not only reached the global status of F1, it arguably had already surpassed it.
Then it all went down the drain, because Tony George rather wanted to be the king of a tiny swamp then the prince of an empire. And Bernie and the Frances were all too happy to help him demolish their main rival.
Bait
I didn't know anyone that followed IRL. I live in Ohio, and I think maybe it's because we have Mid-Ohio sports car course that people around here tend to like road courses more. I certainly am one of those people. I much more enjoyed going to see Champ cars at Mid-Ohio, than driving a state over to go to Indy. Indianapolis is about the spectacle, I have never seen more people in one place ever in my life. The better actual race to watch was Mid-Ohio, and Champ cars.
That Player's Forsythe under that lighting is 😍
I love AC’s showroom mode.
The CART/IRL split pushed me to F1 and aside from the Indy 500 I didn't watch American open wheel racing for years. I've come back around, but I'm still not a fan of the single chassis and 2 engine manufacturers building sealed engines the teams can't mess with. I remember going to Indy with my dad in the 80s for qualifying and Carb day and seeing the big Offenhauser(Offies, as my dad called them) engines and the subtle, and not so subtle, differences in the way teams built their cars. But I'm an old guy now, so...
The absolute irony of George being mad at the teams and what Indicar had become, creating his own series, winning the war against CART but now Penske owns it and it has esentially become what CART was and what George hated gg.
As an European I don't have much insight, but it does feel like a big nothing burger.
The whole thing was like watching two petulant children arguing about not getting there way. But my loyalty was always to the greatest spectacle in racing more that anything else. In the end, I’m happy it sorted itself out! IndyCar proper is back with a a different look. But I do get one of Tony George’s key points. CART was getting ridiculously expensive and he created a series that cut the costs dramatically! Fun fact. The fastest recorded lap at Indy, unofficial or not, was done by Arie Lyendyke, during the first year of the IRL in a previous years CART IndyCar. CART didn’t get the honors of being the fastest cars ever at Indy even though it was one of their old cars.
That photo while discussing the US 500 was quite misleading....
It was from 2010. The US 500 was in 1996, and drew over 110,000 in attendance.
I don't know if this idea has been done. But I would like to see the effect of cigarettes and racing as a whole. Because in my opinion, I think a lot of racing, especially by the '90s was subsidized by tobacco.
Sponsors like Marlboro, kool and players probably gave away a lot of seats.
I don't have full facts for this, but it probably was much bigger than it actually was.
I look back to the imsa in the '80s when they had camel sponsorship. Their seats were packed as well.
That's true. But on the other hand Red Bull (who are just as wealthy as any cigarette sponsor) had both the an IRL team (the Cheever team) and their own NASCAR team, before dropping the IRL team for a single CART entry (driven by Doornbos) and then dropping open wheel sponsorship in the US entirely.
Tony George had a good idea on paper. America has its own unique motor sports culture. But if he wanted to bring back the USAC days, the cars needed to go front engine. Open engine, open chassis. Make the things 410 sprit cars but for speedways. Maybe have a handful of rounds on dirt. The goal was to have Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart go to Indy rather than Charlotte. He never got that the problem was the damn car.
They have/had that. It's called the USAC Silver Crown Series. It came to be when the pavement and dirt cars got so totally different from each other, the nail in that coffin came from Jack Brabham sticking his toe in the Indy waters, and Colin Chapman diving in head first and changing pavement racing so much that it could never go back to what USAC Championship Car racing was. Those were not cars builders over here had a grasp of. They needed to put down there tools, go outside, take a deep breath and change their business to fore go building cars for that series.
Oh yeah, I’m well aware of the history, and I’ve actually been to silver crown races at Toledo. My point was if Tony George was serious about bringing back the “good ol days” the 96 500 would have been run with those cars. Instead of the whole thing just being a naked power play that fucked American open wheel racing to this day.
I've been watching every IndyCar race and I've noticed no commercials with IndyCars in them, except HyVee and IndyCar themselves. Honda using Red Bulls and Chevy does their new 'IT' thing to market. Verizon might have a 5 second thing for one of Penske's cars at the end of a ad, but that's it. I live in Indy too.
When I was in Canada there were James Hinchcliffe cutouts in the windows of Honda dealers (I think. It was there or Canadian Tyre branches or something) but that was it.
Some racing series didn't expound to their sponsors to make the sponsorship really work is that they have to spend at a 3:1 ratio of advertising dollars supporting their sponsorship of said racing team.
The split was not just a “waste of time” it was utterly catastrophic to US open-wheel racing. It’s becoming increasingly staggering to see how the sport still to this day has not recovered. The series is okay, but had Indycar run the cars of 1996-2000 at the Indy 500… utter box office!! You suggest in the beginning of the video I think that it wasn’t going to rival F1? I totally disagree. Indycar had everything it needed to compete. Had Indycar gone into Europe unified with the Indy 500 as Champcar did in early 00s it could’ve seriously threatened F1. To this day the split stands as the greatest warning to anyone that proposes running a breakaway competition alongside the existing competition. Because not only does it not work, it fundamentally cripples the sport itself. Sadly, as history continues to show to this day, that lesson will be it’s greatest legacy.
A good assesment of the entire mess.
Thanks AM
Yes, it eliminated bad leadership in both series and 2 poor sanctioning bodies. The series now has both the sanctioning and series promotion under 1 umbrella. Just need a couple more ovals in the 1 mile range with very little banking.
Keep it going Aidan!!
The split came at the worst time. CART was doing well in the '90s, Nigel Mansell going there for '93 brought it so much attention on the world stage. It wasn't just that place where failed Brazillian F1 rejects go to earn a living any more. By the end of the decade the series was doing so well. Seems like 2001 and various things which happened that year was the turning point and started its decline... The expansion into European races wasn't a success either. Without the split a united single championship surely would have been able to weather the post-2001 economic slump and reluctance to fly/travel abroad better.
[P.S. Have you done a video about how Mansell's time in Indycar went? 1993 didn't go how most people imagine, most wins coming on ovals - not what you would expect. That huge crash and injury - hiting the wall so hard it knocked a lump of concrete off the back face. And other things like the weaving controversy - introducing the Americans to the novel idea of defending you position on a road/street track (too dangerous to do on ovals ofc). Then 1994 came, you needed a Penske to win and....]
I love IndyCar, always have, always will, it is the greatest form of motorsport in the world, the world will always have greedy power-hungry people who do their dead level best to destroy something, but if it's a great product like IC is and always has been then it will survive
Honestly, you need about a 30-45 min discussion to fully understand the reasons and parse the winners and losers of the split and why the outcome was an version of Indycar that, on the surface, looks like CART pre-split, but very much isn’t.
Even around 2001 CART still had a decent amount of ovals, once all the ovals abandoned CART and switched to the IRL Cart was useless, especially once they stopped running a 500 mile oval race.
Yaknow, I’ve totally forgotten when this whole Roberto Moreno thing all started. Seems like a thousand years ago now. Doesn’t really matter, I’ll keep waiting.
I disagree with Indycar having become CART. It is lacking the prestige that CART had. The series has just finished its 12th season with the same chassis. Development of engines is nearly frozen. There is no technical development whatsoever. That was what CART was all about with multiple chassis, tyre and engine suppliers battling it out. That was part of the fascination. Already in the 90s Nascar had the better TV ratings. But CART had the prestige and the better sponsors. Now we have a spec racing series apart from some mechanical parts. Of course, the question whether Indycar without the split would have become an F1 rival or would have collapsed due to escalating will never be answered. Anyway, Tony George ruined it single handedly. One of greatest pyrrhic victories in the history of all commerce probably.
This will probably not go over so well with the formula car/road racing culture that seem to permeate the comments here, but....Although I agree that the split ended up basically with something resembling CART run by The Speedway, the real issue for us open wheel oval track fans in North America is that NOTHING definitive came out of the split. There's a serious cultural difference here as it relates to the road racing vs oval track stuff. It's not just the track configuration. Those of us who sided with The Speedway, really wanted sprint car, midget, and Supermodified drivers back in Indy car racing . I admit to being duped by the likes of Tony George and his opportunism, but, I think Indy car racing still should be the place where open wheel oval track racing is the focus and should be the destination series for that arm of the sport. The issue here though is that those that control Indy car are still of the Eurocentric formula car road racing culture and have no connection with open wheel oval track racing. This has caused a mass alienation of t he open wheel oval track fanbase and why they have no interest in whatever Indy car is selling these days. It's also a the reason Indy car has to put on silly street parades in Nashville and Detroit while perfectly useable ovals are nearby. The formula car road racing fanbase isn't large enough to sell seats at racing facilities like Michigan International Speedway...
9:50 Pure facts!
I'd forgotten how good that Arrows A23 looked. I still think it was the best looking car of that year.
TLDR: No
Also, the biggest travesty to me is that beautiful Panoz chassis got put on the shelf for those hideous Dallara crapwagons
This never could have happened without General Motors support of Indycar, at the height of CART's popularity Bernie Ecclestone was broaching some sort of merger with CART. The series has yet to recover from this, I haven't liked General Motors since the 80's but after this I had no respect for them in racing. This was a power play with no regard for the fans.
It saved open wheel racing in the United States. but I don't think either series survived.
It destroyed open wheel racing in the US. CART would have gotten so much more tobacco money had it retained the monopoly and popularity with F1 moving away from it and CART being a more bang for buck option. Then instead of being in bad financial strife and having to shoot wildly to try to keep the audience and get international money, CART would have been slowly able to transition to smaller scale financial series.
At its worst it would have been like Indycar is now. And in 2023 it would have been as big as NASCAR is nowin the US,with more international fame. Not huge, but very healthy
This whole split is just a bizarre expensive way to learn that time is basically a flat circle.
CART was the better series in terms of racing. The 05-06 Champcar was such a masterpiece of a machine, if a little ugly. The IRL cars of the time were pretty cool as well, but Dan Weldon's death kind of tainted it for me. Indycar seems to me to have fone back in the right direction. 2018 and 2019 were some of the absolute greatest seasons IMO. Those cars were sexy. The Aeroscreen kind of killed that, but the cars are still awesome.
Your final "would" question is probably the truth. Without the split, Indy would've ended up being insanely expensive. The split let the teams focus on what was actually popular (the month of May), which tracks were best for the show, and how the cars can be designed to keep speeds up but also be safe* and, most importantly, affordable.
*Yes Dan Wheldon, Justin Wilson and Robert Wickens, but all three of those are freak accidents rather than the Krosnoff, Rodriguez and Moore ones.
"Without the split, Indy would've ended up being insanely expensive. " Racing teams will always spend as much money as they have. The only reason they don't spend much now (and many of the teams can't afford new chassis or new engines) is because Indycar is not popular enough to draw sponsorship at a higher level. Having the Indy 500 as the only high profile event is a *BIG* problem.
You should make a video on how motorsports around the world went aero crazy I.e. indycar area package, f1 2017 regs, v8 Supercars gen 2 regs
The real split was when CART split from USAC...everything that has happened since then is a direct result of that first disagreement because that's when "The Sars" and "The Race" first fell out...
I got talking about this in Jakecord about Porsche trying to build a carbon monocoque for CART then getting banned by Penske only for him to get one himself the next year. Which hilarious conflict of interests like that its honestly no wonder Indycar imploded like it did, Tony George was right on pretty much every issue he had except American drivers and wanting ovals and having the ladder system be sprint cars. I don't know that Indycar would be that much better off today or at least better off by 2008 if they don't split because it was a shitshow for a long time.
Would love to hear your thoughts/opinion on Vettel's apparent drop in form post blown-diffuser ban. I've always thought he wasn't the same driver after the regs changed, and that the specific characteristics associated with blown-diffuser style cars brought out the best of him. Could be complete coincidence, however.