Reasons to care about the IRL-Champ Car merger

By DAVID GREEN

Everyone who anticipates a boring weekend at Fontana might distract themselves with a little pondering of the long-awaited, long-overdue merger of the Indy Racing League and Champ Car (formerly CART), announced Friday.

Even if you're not into open-wheel racing, even if your disdain for it is even greater than your fervor for stock cars, you can find something to chew on. Just take a look at the column by the Associated Press' Nancy Armour.

With all due respect to Nancy and her opinions (hey -- after all, her column is posted under a kicker headline that says, IN MY OPINION), like many mainstream sports columnists and a good many motorsports specialists, she misses the boat on a few points.

The point of interest to most NASCAR addicts is her assertion that the split of open-wheel racing that ensued in 1996 after Tony George's formation of the IRL is what fueled NASCAR's rise to the pinnacle of American motor sport.

The more accurate milestone would be 1978, when Indy car team owners formed CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams). At that point, the die was cast for the decline of Indy car racing and the rise of NASCAR. Anybody remember what happened in the very next Daytona 500?

Such was the arrogance of CART team owners that, smart guys that they are, they couldn't see fit to put Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart in one of their cars. I don't think it's a huge reach to suggest that Indy car racing and its signature event would have been much healthier had just these two guys been driving those cars instead of NASCAR sedans the past 10 or 15 years.

But not only would Gordon and Stewart have handsomely filled the gap left by the retirement of the likes of A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti and Rick Mears, they would have paved the way for other USAC drivers such as Kenny Irwin Jr., Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne, Mike Bliss, and others who instead followed them to NASCAR.

When the 1996 split occurred, NASCAR was already a juggernaut destined to rise to the pinnacle of American auto racing. The momentum was built on a mix of great racing, colorful characters, widespread television coverage and a couple of decades of unparalleled sports marketing and promotion by R.J. Reynolds and the likes of H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler. The IRL-CART split merely provided a catalyst -- or, perhaps more accurately, an unwitting capitulation.

Here's hoping that the merger will put Indy car racing back on the track to progress. I think competition is good -- not only among the cars on a single track at one time, but within motorsports overall.