The rise and fall (or not) of dictators

By DAVID GREEN

Remember the old days, when Bruton Smith would grumpily suggest that an alternative to NASCAR might be a good thing for stock car racing, and made veiled threats (or promises, if you prefer) that he might be the one to start a new series?

Remember what happened a little more than a dozen years ago, when Tony George did what Bruton talked about doing and started his own IndyCar series in competition with CART?

Well, now Formula One faces the prospect of a breakaway series.

What were Bruton's complaints, other than the prospect of lost revenues for races NASCAR would not grant to the Speedway Motorsports Inc. chairman, who then had to purchase tracks such as North Wilkesboro and Rockingham to move their races to his new speedways?

To sum it up, dictatorial leadership of NASCAR.

Indeed, the sanctioning body had all but celebrated that fact. Founder Bill France said in an interview not long before his death in 1992, "I may have been a dictator, but I was a benevolent one."

What was Tony George's concern when he formed the breakaway Indy Racing League?

To sum it up, dictatorial leadership of CART -- not by an individual, but by a committee of race team owners.

What are the complaints of Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) members about F1 racing?

To sum it up, dictatorial leadership -- by European auto club president Max Mosley and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone's Formula One Management (FOM).

Ah, those dictators. The most infamous ones would have to be Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, but we've had many -- Saddam Hussein, to name a more recent figure. Many of them, beginning with Caesar in modern civilization, get their comeuppance.

All these scenarios -- the one that didn't happen in NASCAR, the one that did happen in Indycar racing and the one that looms in F1 -- have a common ingredient, I believe -- arrogance and greed.

As is the case with any discussion such as this one, observers may spin the facts to suit their own opinions. From my standpoint, NASCAR's desire to control a majority of its venues was profit-driven. There's nothing wrong with making a profit, unless you're a hard-line socialist, but it's a fine line between good business and gouging.

Many CART sympathizers will reject this, but I assign primary arrogance and greed in the IndyCar feud to CART's rule by committee. Drivers of the caliber of Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart couldn't get rides in CART, which -- along with the Indianapolis 500 -- should have been natural career destinations for both. IRL came along too late for Gordon and too late to hang onto Stewart.

It's hard to find a good guy in the F1 debacle, given the obscene amounts of money thrown around in that sport, even in recessionary times. But most observers, I believe, see Mosley as a bogus pervert and their nickname for Ecclestone is the Evil Dwarf (Bernie is a jockey-sized man). The sympathies of most fans, I suspect, are with the glamour teams such as Ferrari and McLaren.

Will FOTA actually go ahead and establish its own breakaway championship? Will it succeed because of its assets (the aforementioned glamour teams), as the IRL did because of Tony George's trump card, the Indy 500?

Would American stock car racing be better off now if Bruton or somebody else had actually gone head-to-head with NASCAR?

Three questions without answers, at this point. We'll have to wait and see about the first two and we can only speculate about the third.