#champ car

[scottdixon]

[frederikvesti]

© Torsten Blackwood

[coimbrabertone]

Champ Car: the World Series that Actually Was.

There's the old joke that Europeans always throw around, that we Americans invent our own sports that only we play, and then we call it the World Series. Now, nevermind that the baseball World Series features playing talent from all across the world - Shohei Ohtani, the top player right now, is Japanese, for instance - because there was an American sport that truly was a world series.

Champ Car.

The Champ Car story begins in 1978, when, following a plane crash that led to the deaths of eight top USAC - United States Auto Club - officials, Dan Gurney wrote the White Paper, calling for massive reforms. Dan Gurney was not only a team owner in CART, but his All-American Racers - under the guise of Anglo-American Racers - bad previously competed in Formula One.

In the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix, Dan Gurney won in his own car, the Eagle Mark 1, also known as the T1G. This beauty of a car, with its Weslake V12 engine, marked the only time that an American car with an American driver won a Formula One race.

When that guy says that your series is fucked, it's fucked.

So, Dan's White Paper led to the creation of CART - Championship Auto Racing Teams - which marked the team owners taking control of the series and organizing it on their principles. For more detail on this era of CART, I recommend Elizabeth Blackstock's Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys podcast, which recently did an episode on this.

For our purposes, the important thing to note is that, by the late 80s, CART was doing business as the "CART PPG Indy Car World Series" and began putting on events inside the US, but also outside of it. Toronto came first in 1986, there was a failed attempt to race in Fuji in 1989, a successful race in Surfers Paradise, Australia, from 1991, and a race in Vancouver from 1990.

There was a problem, however.

The reason that the Fuji race in 1989 failed was because the FIA intervened against CART racing outside of North America. CART's attention soon shifted to Surfers Paradise, where the FIA put pressure on the Confederation of Australian Motorsports to prevent Surfers Paradise from going ahead. Nevertheless, by 1991, CART was able to put on the Gold Coast IndyCar Grand Prix, which would soon become a mainstay on the CART calendar.

Shortly afterwards, CART and the FIA would reach a settlement: Surfers Paradise would be grandfathered in, CART had freedom to race anywhere they wanted in North America, but everywhere else in the world, CART would be restricted to ovals.

The first of these international ovals came at the 1.9-mile trapezoid known as "Emerson Fittipaldi Speedway" at Jacarepaguá, the former Formula One track in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This came in 1996, as CART was experiencing the split, where the Indy Racing League broke away and took the Indy 500 with them.

In 1998, backed by Honda, Indycar would see another international oval in the form of Twin Ring Motegi, finally giving the series its race in Japan.

The loss of the Indy 500 seemed to mark CART doubling down on the international expansion, because in 2001, two additional international ovals followed: Lausitzring in Germany and Rockingham Motor Speedway (no relation to Rockingham Speedway, formerly known as North Carolina Motor Speedway) in the UK. Additionally, the 2001 season opener was on the Fundidora Park street circuit in Monterrey, Mexico.

Between Monterrey, Motegi, Toronto, Vancouver, Germany, Rockingham, and Surfers Paradise, seven of the series' twenty events were held outside of the US. It was supposed to be eight of twenty-one, however, the Rio 200 was cancelled in 2001 and the event never returned.

2001 was generally a season of disasters for CART, as its showpiece European doubleheader of Germany and Rockingham was overshadowed first by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and then by Alex Zanardi's paralyzing crash at the Lausitzring.

2001, between various disasters, teams defecting to the IRL to get into the Indianapolis 500, and the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement placing stricter limitations on tobacco advertising, marked the beginning of the end for CART.

However, two things happened.

First, the European Commission's Competition Directorate began a probe into the FIA in 1999, accusing them as acting as a monopoly on motorsports. They believed that the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone were using Formula One and their other series to block competitors, prevent rival series, and prevent contracted circuits from hosting competing events. By 2001, the FIA and EC would settle, and the FIA would no longer have a monopoly on motorsports.

In the short term, this allowed CART to replace the struggling Rockingham event with a "Champ Car London Trophy" at Brands Hatch for 2003, in the long term...well, I'll get to that in a moment.

Second, after the 2003 CART season, the series went bankrupt and it was eventually bought out by a trio of team owners, Gerry Forsythe (Team Player's), Kevin Kalkhoven (PK Raving), and Paul Gentilozzi (Rocketsports) who rescued the series. Buying a supply of Ford's Cosworth engines, they put together the Champ Car World Series as a successor to CART.

The 2004 CCWS season consisted of fourteen races, of which, Monterrey, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Surfers Paradise, were outside of the United States.

In 2005, Vancouver was replaced by Edmonton.

In 2007, Montreal would be replaced by Mont Tremblant, additionally, a Belgian race at Zolder and a Dutch race at Assen were added. Monterrey was lost, but it was not seven events in the US, seven outside.

The 2008 Champ Car World Series that never was, was due to add Jerez to the calendar, making for six US races to eight outside of the United States.

Instead, however, Champ Car merged with the IRL to create the modern Indycar series.

In 2008, Edmonton was retained, Surfers Paradise was a non-championship finale, and there was also the race at Motegi, which had joined Honda in defecting from CART to the IRL in 2003.

In 2009, Surfers Paradise would go away, but Toronto would return.

Motegi would persist until 2010, but the oval would be damaged in the 2011 Japanese earthquake and the resulting tsunami. A final race in 2011 - appropriately called "Indy Japan: the Final" - would instead be held on the Motegi road course, as seen in MotoGP.

Edmonton would last until 2012.

From 2010-2013, Indycar put together its own overseas race, the Sao Paulo Indy 300 on a street circuit in Anhembi Parque. Thus 2014 was the first time since 1990 that there was not an Indycar race of some form outside of North America.

To make up for this, 2014 had three doubleheader races, at Belle Isle, Houston, and in Toronto.

Since then, there was an attempt to return to Brazil in 2015 at the other Autodromo Internacional Nelson Piquet, this one in Brasilia, but that one failed to materialize.

Likewise, there was supposed to be an Indycar exhibition race at Termas de Rio Hondo in Argentina in either 2024 or 2025, however, the controversial President Javier Milei slashed government spending, which ultimately killed not only the Indycar Argentina event, but also the long running Argentinian Motorcycle Grand Prix in MotoGP.

Champ Car was a flawed series. It was the spectre of CART dragging out the American open wheel racing split for another four years. In those four years, Sebastien Bourdais won the championship each time, him and his Newman/Haas Racing team often seeming like the only competent team in a sea of Brazilian paydrivers and Formula One rejects.

That being said, it marked the high point of Indycar racing overseas and, despite only existing for four years, managed to build a completely new car - the Panoz DP01 - to replace its aging Lola B02/00 chassis.

There is a lot that modern Indycar is doing right - the return of ovals with doubleheaders at Iowa and Milwaukee in addition to the Gateway race, and now the season finale at 1.3-mile Nashville Superspeedway is great - however, one area where it is supremely lacking is international events.

The 2024 NTT Indycar Series has drivers from all over the world - my last blogpost was about a Kiwi doing 234.2 miles per hour around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway - but it does not have the schedule to back it up. The fact that one of the most popular stars in the series in Pato O'Ward is literally from Monterrey, Mexico and the series hasn't even seriously considered going back there is downright foolish.

NASCAR is making moves to potentially go to Montreal, Canada and Mexico City, Mexico as early as 2025. If NASCAR, with exactly two foreign drivers - Daniel Suarez and Shane Van Gisbergen - beats Indycar to international expansion, then the Penske Entertainment regime will have truly failed.

And that makes me sad, because like I made clear in the last blogpost, Team Penske is an amazing team with so much history and so many successes.

I just wish their series ownership was as successful as their race teams.

[weihnachten]

Took half the race team out to VIR in the Town Car for ChampCarEndurance weekend!

[steel-and-asphalt]

A collection of cars barrel through the turn at Indianapolis. CART PPG Indy Car World Series, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 1981 Indianapolis 500

[dave-mech]

Weekend’s shopping

[fisicol92]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duNKaCRm89c)

Road America circuit Guide

Circuit History

A sign outside Road America's Turn 5 proudly declares the facility as "America's National Park of Speed" and it is hard to put forward a counter-argument. With a layout largely unchanged since its mid-1950s inauguration, this four mile course has plaid host to some of the country's most prominent road racing championships.

But the story actually begins a few miles to the north in the village of Elkhart Lake. In the late 1940s, sports car racing was on the rise, but there was a distinct lack of courses on which the sport of road racing could flourish. A group of sports car enthusiasts from the Chicago Region and Milwaukee Region of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) began looking for public roads that could make a suitable circuit and, at the suggestion of member Jim Kimberly who had grown up in Wisconsin, flew out for a closer inspection.

From the air, the roads around Elkhart Lake looked most promising and, upon landing, the delegation headed off to meet village leaders. With the local economy in a stick patch thanks to the recent closure of a canning factory, support was quickly gleaned for a road race, which could do much to revive the flagging fortunes. Planning quickly got under way for the very first Elkhart Lake races on July 23, 1950.

The first course was to the north of the lake, combining Highways X, P and J into a roughly-triangular 3.35-miles course. The first road race was a 'trial event' organized and conducted by the newly formed Chicago and Milwaukee SCCA Regions and featuring a high-calibre list of drivers, including John Fitch, Briggs Cunningham, Phil Hill and a young Carroll Shelby. Appropriately the main feature race fell to Jim Kimberley in a Ferrari 166M, watched by an estimated 5,000 spectators.

In 1951 and '52 the new course played host to some thrilling races watched by enormous crowds – some suggest up to 50,000 flocked to watch, all of whom were forbidden from sitting during the races in case they needed a head start to outrun an errant car! The dangers of such an approach were not lost on state legislators who promptly passed laws which banned racing on public roads.

Even before the ban, there were tentative plans for a closed circuit on a 635-acre area north of the village boundary. These proved fruitless when the land proved too difficult to buy, given its close proximity to the back yards of some homeowners. It seemed the era of racing in this part of Wisconsin was to be short-lived, if sweet.

One man, however, begged to differ. Cliff Tufte was a civil engineer, president of the Elkhart Sand and Gravel Co, which had built its business as a major supplier of highway and railroad ballast in eastern Wisconsin. When the market dropped off, it found its greatest asset was the parcel of land it owned two-miles south of Elkhart Lake near to the town of Plymouth. Could this, in fact, provide the solution that everyone was looking for, Tufte pondered?

With a vision of what a new circuit could look like, Tufte began gathering support for his plans. The SCCA was invited to the site and the representatives liked it so much; they agreed to sanction a national road race in if, and when, the course was completed. In October 1954, Road America, Inc. was formed and stocks were sold. The members of the Chicago Region SCCA largely financed the project which had an estimated cost of $175,000.

After first walking the land laying out the track in his mind, Tufte took inspiration from the surrounding countryside, gathering ideas and measuring the turns of the Wisconsin roads. Work to stake out the land for construction was completed even before the spring thaw and in April 1955 April, a bulldozer broke ground and grading on the four-mile road course began.

And what a circuit Tufte built. Undeniably America's finest road course, Road America - as it was named - is a circuit which can be uttered in the same breathe as the finest circuits in Europe. Built to the toughest standards around, it is said that Tufte used to roll the circuit diagonally every day, helping to maintain its surface. The managers who succeeded Tufte did not lavish the same love and attention to the track, but thankfully the current owners have invested hard to bring the circuit back to its best.

The track itself remains virtually unchanged to this day, though advances in safety requirements have transformed the look of the place from a country roadside to a modern racing circuit, complete with wide grassed run off. In 1966 a new pit lane was installed, separated from the racing circuit by Armco barrier for the first time. The fabled pagoda race control and media building, placed at a jaunty angle at the end of the pit lane, was superseded by a charmless concrete structure on the opposite side of the start/finish straight in 1984.

The original pagoda went out in a blaze of glory; it was set alight and used for fire-fighting practice in early 1990, ahead of a planned pit lane extension which more than doubled the capacity of the paddock. Thankfully the new pagoda was given a makeover to soften its lines with the boxy nature disguised by a new facade which mimicked the lines of the old wooden structure.

In 2003 a chicane was installed for AMA motorcycle competitors,at The Kink, marking the only change to the course layout throughout Road America's history. The original layout remains in place for four-wheeled competition.

Other changes include drastic enlargement of run-off areas and gravel traps, particularly at turn one and the removal of the bridge at Turn 13 after the 2006 season. This had always proved troublesome, as the abutment was in the middle of the corner, providing competitors with an unappealing route straight into a concrete wall should things go wrong. Jerry Titus, perished from injuries sustained at this spot 1970 when his Pontiac Trans-Am Firebird ran wide and impacted the wall, while Memo Gidley was extremely fortunate to escape with a broken arm when his Ganassi-run Champ Car did much the same in 2001. A tunnel now provides access to the infield between Turns 13 and 14.

Around the course spectacular scenery abounds, with plenty of space to accommodate large crowds, although the lack of hotels in the immediate area can cause a few headaches. Most drivers love the circuit, although its length tends to bring out the worst in cars, with a string of mechanical failures down the years producing unlikely winners. Ex-Formula 1 driver Hector Rebaque took victory in the inaugural Indycar race in 1982 and Gilles Villeneuve's older brother, Jacques, won three years later. His nephew, Jacques Jr, dominated in 1994, while Christian Fittipaldi scored a first victory in 1999 and Bruno Junquiera struck gold in 2001.

Today the major races are rounds of the Nascar Nationwide Series, Tudor United SportsCar Championship and a vintage festival, which recreates some of the atmosphere of those early events around the lake.

[frederikvesti]

i think im funny (only 4 people will get this)