Columnist Brian Hilderbrand: CART eyes big changes

Friday, March 24, 2000 | 9:45 a.m.

Brian Hilderbrand's motor sports notebook appears Friday. Reach him at bh@vegas.com or 259-4089.

Championship Auto Racing Teams open its 22nd season this weekend in South Florida, but CART chairman Andrew Craig said he can envision the day when the open-wheel series holds its season opener a month or two earlier.

Perhaps even on the West Coast -- possibly even in Las Vegas.

Craig said this week during a teleconference with the media that he foresees a "radical change" in the series' schedule taking place by the start of the 2002 season, if not earlier.

Because CART races go head-to-head with the National Football League for the final two months of its racing season, Craig said he would like to see a schedule that started in late January or early February and ended by mid-September. The current CART season will not be completed until the end of October.

"The fact of the matter is that if you look at the (television) rating performance of all sports other than football, once football comes on air, if you're head-to-head with football, it's a challenge," Craig said. "(The NFL) is a very, very dominant property and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to go head-to-head with football, if you can avoid it.

"Now, there's an 'if' in that. Sometimes you can't avoid these conflicts, but where we can, it would make a lot more sense if we could, and one of the ways to avoid it is to start your season earlier and finish it earlier."

And that, Craig said, is where a venue such as Las Vegas Motor Speedway could come in.

"Las Vegas is obviously a very important market which our sponsors like a lot, and also a market where we can run early in the year; so you can see that on any list of potential new venues, you couldn't have such a list and not have Las Vegas on it," he said.

However, Craig was quick to point out that he has had no "material" talks with officials at the Speedway or its owner, Speedway Motorsports, Inc., about staging a race on the 1.5-mile superspeedway.

"We have talked with the folks over at (SMI) from time to time," Craig said. "Those talks are nothing more than keeping in touch and exchanging ideas and exchanges views; they are not of a material nature at all."

* NASCAR: NASCAR appears to be giving serious thought about moving to common templates for its Winston Cup cars. It has been reported that Ray Evernham has stopped working on the design of the 2001 Dodge Intrepid until NASCAR makes a final determination. ...

Busch Series regular Adam Petty will attempt to make his first Winston Cup start in the DirecTV 500 at Texas Motor Speedway on April 2. Petty, the son of Kyle Petty and grandson of Richard Petty, said he plans to compete in five Winston Cup races this season. ...

For the second week in a row, Las Vegas native Brendan Gaughan is pulling double duty. Gaughan plans to run both the NASCAR Winston West Series and NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series races this weekend at Mesa Marin Raceway in Bakersfield, Calif.

Last weekend at Phoenix International Raceway, Gaughan finished fourth in the Winston West race and a career-best 13th in the truck race.

* CART: Team Kool Green driver Dario Franchitti has been cleared by CART medical personnel to drive in this weekend's season opener at Miami-Homestead Speedway.

Franchitti, who suffered a fractured pelvis and brain contusions in a testing crash at Homestead on Feb. 9, successfully completed two days of testing at Nazareth Speedway last weekend. ...

Michael Andretti, CART's winningest active driver with 38 career victories, was picked to win this year's series championship by a panel of 15 CART team managers. Team Rahal's Max Papis was second in balloting; Franchitti was third; defending champion Juan Montoya (Target/Chip Ganassi Racing) was fourth; and Christian Fittipaldi (Newman/Haas Racing) was fifth. Las Vegas residents Paul Tracy (sixth) and Jimmy Vasser (10th) also finished in the top 10.

* IRL: Six drivers, including Las Vegas resident Jimmy Vasser and Juan Montoya of CART's Target/Chip Ganassi Racing, will take part in a two-day IRL test Wednesday and Thursday at LVMS.

Vasser and Montoya will be participating in their first test of the IRL cars they plan to run in the Indianapolis 500 this May. The team still is undecided whether Vasser and Montoya will compete in the IRL race at LVMS on April 22.

The test, which will run from approximately 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days, will be open to the public, free of charge.

* NHRA: Team Winston Pro Stock Motorcycle rider Angelle Seeling, ranked fourth in the Winston Pro Stock Motorcycle points standings, will make her 50th career start at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Seeling is 41 points behind leader Dave Schultz and two points behind third-place Matt Hines.

"I feel like Team Winston came out of Gainesville in pretty good shape," Seeling said as she looked ahead to Las Vegas. "I'm optimistic because I'll have our number-one engine back in the bike."

* BACKMARKERS: IMCA dirt racing returns to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway half-mile dirt oval Saturday after a short vacation for the Pennzoil World of Outlaws sprint car races and the Monster Truck nationals.

Besdies the IMCA Late Model Division, IMCA Modifieds will race for national points as Jim Perkins tries to make it two feature wins in a row. Legends Cars and Thunder Stox also will compete.

Spectator gates will open at 6 p.m. with heat races at 7:30. ...

WORX Radio (www.worxradio.com) will host a live radio webcast from Kim Gregory's Unlimited Hydroplane test on Lake Pleasant in Arizona next Wednesday at 3 p.m. (PST). Gregory, a Las Vegas businessman who owns the U-10 York and U-5 Appian Jeronimo Hydroplanes, will be joined by drivers Mark Weber and George Stratton and UHRA commissioner Ken Muscatel on the webcast.

Brian Hilderbrand's motor sports notebook appears Friday. Reach him at bh@vegas.com or 259-4089.

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