Robin Miller Still Doesn't Get It

Robin Miller authors a self-pitying soliloquy on being fired from several media outlets over the years where he pats himself on the back for attacking the IRL from its beginning in 1996 and for the fact that some have lamented the evolution of the series into "CART Lite" (A.J. Foyt's term). Now certainly there is ample reason to take IRL's present course to task, but Miller's slightly revisionist history needs rebuttal.

The Indy 500 has lost lister and crowds, but claiming it's because of the IRL is wrong, because the IRL, even when on the wrong track as it's been since 2003, has nonetheless produced much better racing than most of what its chief open wheel rival, CART, ever did, and one needs to remember that open wheel racing was already in noticable decline in 1994-5 because of CART.

CART was a mistake to begin with. Born in 1979 from Roger Penske and Pat Patrick, it was able to spring to life thanks to the power vacuum at USAC following Anton Hulman's death and the deaths of several key USAC officials in a 1978 plane crash. CART was a sanctioning body run by the sport's richest car owners for their own competitive self-aggrandizement. The corrupt nature of CART was graphically illustrated by the late Andy Kenopensky's running and loud battle against CART during the 1980s and given what amounted to written form by 1993's CART White Paper on conflict of interest within the sanctioning body, a paper that showed CART was run "like a white's only country club," as writer Joe Scalzo put it at the time.

Tony George founded IRL in 1996 amid near-universal condemnation. CART was advertised as "The Real Stars, The Real Cars, The Real Race." It was none of the above; it was a closed-loop of super-rich teams buying championships. IRL in its first handful of years was closer to mid-1970s NASCAR in that it was peopled with small, scrappy raceteams and produced excellent racing. Indeed, it was IRL that directly influenced CART into the one mechanical change that actually improved racing - after IRL's exciting Texas Indy 300 in June 1998, a competitive race made such by bigger IRL wings and bulky ram-air scoops atop the cars, CART developed the Hanford rail for its superspeedway wings to increase the power of the draft. It succeeded at the 1998 Michigan 500 as the lead changed 63 times, obliterating the record for a 500-mile open wheel race by a factor of some 100%.

Open wheel racing became relevent again with IRL and both bodies produced ferocious superspeedway battles with draft-inducing bodies and add-on pieces; IRL produced must-see 300-milers at Texas, Kentucky, Kansas, and Chicagoland and when it took over Michigan and Fontana it produced some good racing at those venues as well; before then, CART's 500-milers at Fontana and Michigan became must-see races once the Hanford wing was mandated - the 50-lead-change barrier was broken at Michigan in 1998, 2000, and the track's CART swan song in 2001, while Fontana broke the 50-lead-change barrier in 2000 and 2001 - 2001 saw 73 lead changes, only the second automobile race of any sanctioning body to ever reach the 70-lead-change barrier.

The direction of IRL from 2003 onward, however, has been the wrong track as car counts and team counts have dropped due to the cancerous involvement of Honda and Toyota 2003-5; they helped weaken the competitiveness of the racing overall, to where only Kansas in 2005 and Chicagoland in 2006 saw truly competitive racing.

CART, meanwhile, proved a sanctioning body built on a house of cards, collapsing and being reborn under Kevin Kalkhoven into ChampCar. While that body has recoverd reasonably well from the collapse of CART, it nonetheless has its own issues with the cancellation of its Denver GP to go with its lack of exciting racing. There remains a campaign to unify the two sanctioning bodies, but in so doing championship/Indycar racing needs to relearn the lesson that retro-technology and a powerful draft on the superspeedways are what make better racing and what wins fans more than high-tech; that including American short track open wheelers into Indycar racing's field of contenders remains a must; and that car owners must never have a decisive role in rulesmaking, because rules need to be made with the big picture in mind always.

It's a lesson NASCAR needs to relearn as well.

If you ever get a chance to see tapes of the following open-wheel races (some of them are available in highlight form at YouTube), do so, for you will see racing in its purest form -

1990 CART Michigan 500
1992 CART Michigan 500
1996 IRL Las Vegas 300
1998 IRL Texas Indy 300
1998 CART Michigan 500
1999 IRL Texas Indy 300
2000 IRL Texas Indy 300
2000 CART Michigan 500
2000 IRL Kentucky Indy 300
2000 CART California 500
2001 IRL Texas Indy 300
2001 CART Michigan 500
2001 IRL Kansas Indy 300
2001 IRL Lone Star Indy 300
2001 CART California 500
2002 IRL California Indy 400
2002 IRL Kentucky Indy 300
2002 IRL Chicago Indy 300
2002 IRL Lone Star Indy 300
2003 IRL Michigan Indy 400
2003 IRL Chicago Indy 300
2004 IRL Kansas Indy 300
2004 IRL Chicago Indy 300
2005 IRL Kansas Indy 300