Jenkins won’t overdramatize IRL vs. CART

Dick Brinster

Tuesday, May 23, 2000 | 2:54 a.m.

It would be natural to expect ABC's Bob Jenkins to open the Indianapolis 500 broadcast Sunday by calling it a showdown between the warring factions of open-wheel racing.

But he won't.

He'll certainly point out that IRL champion Greg Ray has the pole, flanked by CART champion Juan Montoya. But Jenkins said Tuesday that he won't dwell on the 84th running of the Memorial Day weekend classic being special for that reason.

"I don't think that is the big story here," Jenkins said. "I'm not going to treat this as a CART-IRL battle.

"Every driver in the race has one idea, and that's winning."

Jenkins said there are so many interesting individual stories that the open-wheel split that gave birth to the Indy Racing League in 1996 and led to the boycott of the Indy 500 by CART is not a topic worthy of much time.

But he's excited by the return of two-time race winner Al Unser Jr., who moved this year from CART to the IRL. And Jenkins likes a storyline that includes Lyn St. James and Sarah Fisher - two women in the field for the first time.

"We've got Andy Hillenburg, who always dreamed about it, qualifying in the final few minutes," Jenkins said.

Producer Bob Goodrich said 26 cameras will be utilized, and that a new graphic he called a trackmap relationship will show the progress of the top cars.

"It's never been done," he said. "We're going to do it."

Unser, an ABC guest for the teleconference, said 10-15 cars in the 33-car field have a legitimate chance to win.

"This has the ingredients for wheel-to-wheel racing," he said.

He thinks it might remind the audience of a NASCAR race, saying that kind of close competition is what American fans have responded to. He sees plenty of it in the all-oval IRL, but not enough in CART, where about half the events are on road courses and city streets with single-file racing commonplace.

"There's been a hole in my chest for the last four years, when I didn't turn a lap in a race car at Indy," said Unser, who starts 18th Sunday, one race after ending a five-year victory drought with a win in Las Vegas. "It's a great feeling to officially say I'm back."

The telecast begins at Sunday at Noon EDT.