Friday, April 16, 2004 | 9:55 a.m.
Brian Hilderbrand covers motor sports for the Las Vegas Sun. His motor sports notebook appears Friday. He can be reached at [email protected] or (702) 259-4089.
LONG BEACH, Calif. -- As the Champ Car World Series prepares to open its 2004 season this weekend after purchasing the assets of CART, the rival Indy Racing League tonight is holding its third race of the year -- 5,000 miles away in Motegi, Japan.
That may be great for racing fans, but it's bad for open-wheel racing according to the legendary Mario Andretti.
Although the 9-year-old split between CART (now Champ Car) and the IRL has left open-wheel fans with twice the amount of races, Andretti said the two series need to reunite for the good of the sport.
"That would be, to me, the only solution to really bring open-wheel racing to the level that it deserves," Andretti said this week during a visit to Las Vegas to unveil the Mario Andretti Racing School at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. "When you have the split of ranks like this, you're always going to have a division of the fan support and then you have emotions that are not positive emotions involved.
"Some (fans) support one side, some support the other side so neither side has 100 percent. I think somebody needs to wake up here, that's all I can say."
Andretti, a four-time Indy car national champion and Formula One World Champion, said both sides of the "conflict" are losing sight of the big picture. In its heyday, CART was the only major-league racing series that ran on a combination of street and road courses and oval tracks -- the "most demanding" test of a driver's skills, Andretti said. Today, the IRL runs a 16-race all-oval series while Champ Car has 13 confirmed races that is heavily skewed (12 to 1) toward street and road courses.
"What needs to be understood here is the bigger picture and the big picture is that open-wheel racing is a discipline of its own and needs to stand out, be different," Andretti said. "The product does not need to follow NASCAR or Formula One, it needs to stand on its own. That's why, when CART was the most popular was when they had a good balance between road courses and ovals and no other discipline at that level offered that.
"They need to get back to that ... that's how you differentiate yourself and there's no other formula that will work, in my opinion. They had that and the only thing that ruined that was the greed and politics of the owners. Obviously, they were their own worst enemies because the thing was too democratic and that's what really killed it. The product was there, for sure, it's just that nobody really understood how valuable it was."
At 64 and semi-retired from competitive racing, Andretti is one of the most respected men in auto racing, which led someone to ask him if he would consider a job as commissioner of a unified open-wheel racing series.
"I don't need a job," Andretti said with a laugh. "I don't want to get involved in daily controversies and all that."
But that's not to say that Andretti would not be interested in helping the two sides get together, if he were asked.
"You'd like to think that all of a sudden there's got to be some reasoning where a compromise can be achieved where everybody would win -- there would be no losers by bringing it together, in my opinion," he said. "I'd love to be able to broker something like that if given the opportunity, to be honest with you.
"They know I'm available."
"I think that that just pushes me into early retirement," Gordon said this week when asked what he thought about the prospect of a 40-race schedule. "I love the fact that we have so many tracks that are incredible to race at, so many fans that are supporting the sport and that it continues to grow -- that's nice -- but I know that the teams and drivers are maxed out right now."
Gordon, 32, said he would rather see NASCAR take races from tracks that have two annual events and award them to new or existing facilities as warranted.
"Even if there are some venues that we need to go to, we need to cut some back," he said. "I think that there are some that could be cut back before we start adding any races to the schedule.
"I'm in favor of the sport growing. I'd love to see something in New York and I think there are some tracks on the schedule that a second date would not be a bad thing because they're packing them in there for one and they're huge events and wouldn't it great to be able to accomplish that twice. But I definitely am not in favor of expanding the schedule."
As for the persistent rumors that he is considering leaving NASCAR for a ride in the Formula One World Championship, Gordon said his commitment is to NASCAR.
"I guess I didn't help things too much (by) going and driving the Williams BMW last year," Gordon said of his exhibition last summer with Williams driver Juan Pablo Montoya at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. "I enjoyed it -- it certainly made me think of career decisions eight or nine years ago but I don't think I would have gotten that opportunity to drive a car like that had I not had the success I've had in NASCAR."
Marysville and Snohomish County officials have met with ISC officials about building the Great Northwest Speedway. It marked the first proposal submitted to ISC from a group in the Pacific Northwest, although at least three other public entities in Washington and Oregon also are expected to submit proposals.
NASCAR chairman Brian France repeatedly has identified New York and the Pacific Northwest as areas into which NASCAR would like to expand. The France family has a controlling interest in the publicly traded ISC.
The two-car team gives Champ Car 18 entries for Sunday's 30th annual Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.
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