Nextel Cup -- a stepping stone?

By DAVID GREEN

Many observers point to the split in open-wheel racing as a major factor in the growth of NASCAR racing's popularity. In focusing on the launching of the Indy Racing League and the subsequent bankruptcy of CART, they miss the underlying, fundamental point -- that open-wheel racing, whether in a single series or in dueling rival series, has been losing its star drivers to NASCAR.

If that trend should ever turn around, things will likely be quite different.

In a recent article by the Indianapolis Star's Curt Cavin, the first hint of such a shift can be found. The story is about Kasey Kahne, a USAC champion who has made a successful switch to NASCAR and who has won four times this year in Nextel Cup competition.

Cavin writes, "[Kahne] figures winning a Nextel Cup title would give him the leverage to pursue his ultimate goal -- a ride in the Indianapolis 500."

Those are the writer's words, not a direct quote from Kahne, and they might be considered heresy by many of today's NASCAR fans. But the story is filled with enough evidence to suggest that it didn't require any fantasizing for Cavin to summarize Kahne's intentions as he did.

A merger between the IRL and the Champ Car series that took the place of the defunct CART would be a good thing, for sure, for open-wheel racing. But it's minor compared to what a move away from NASCAR and toward open-wheel racing by one or two marque drivers would do for the IRL, either in its present form or in a reunited state with the vestiges of CART.

It's hard to say whether the exodus of drivers, beginning with Jeff Gordon and continuing over recent years to drivers such as Kahne and J.J. Yeley, was brought about by NASCAR's burgeoning success or whether the addition of such drivers as Gordon, Tony Stewart, Ryan Newman, the late Kenny Irwin Jr. and others was a major contributor to NASCAR becoming such a burgeoning success -- a chicken-and-egg paradox, if you will.

The fact is that NASCAR's success is unprecedented in the history of American sports and popular culture. Only one race -- the Indianapolis 500 -- can claim the kind of mainstream acceptance NASCAR is achieving.

The question is whether NASCAR can sustain the heady level of success to which it has climbed. Turn 3's Keith Ott ponders the question of slumping TV ratings of the sport, one suggestion that the boom might be reaching its crest or slipping past it already. Another indicator is the thousands of fans who have been disguising themselves as empty seats at just about every Nextel Cup race I've seen this year.

Meanwhile, both the IRL and Champ Car are quietly establishing themselves. Not much has been made (especially in NASCAR land) of the fact that this year's Indianapolis 500 not only was one of the best auto races of 2006 so far, but it also drew better TV ratings than the prime-time Coca-Cola 600 later the same day.

Ott suggests that NASCAR has not delivered the to-die-for product it has promised; the question is whether that would matter all that much in a series that is so over-the-top in its numbers. Sooner or later, just about everything reaches the "too much of a good thing" point.

Meanwhile, there's not been much better racing action than that delivered with good consistency over the past several seasons in open-wheel's two leagues.

All of this has led us to the point that an established, objective motorsports journalist has dared to suggest that a young, rising-star driver might be utilizing NASCAR as a stepping-stone to get to his real career destination.

So pompous and myopic have many in NASCAR Nation become, they cannot fathom the notion that something besides NASCAR might be any driver's ultimate objective.

None of this is to suggest that NASCAR is doomed to follow CART into bankrupt extinction. I would love to have a "failure" of NASCAR's magnitude on my hands. But the no-longer-spiraling TV numbers, the no-longer-sold-out Nextel Cup races, and the finite number of legitimate, championship-level stock car teams all combine to suggest that perhaps NASCAR has reached a point where it can't really grow all that much more.

If (or, perhaps, when) a few of those stars of grassroots open-wheel racing ever migrate back to Indianapolis on Memorial Day weekend, the future would suddenly be much brighter for Indy cars. That's not really such a remote possibility, it would seem.