Will anyone notice how good IndyCar is?

Back in 1991, musician/composer Frank Zappa released a live double album documenting what would prove to be his final tour; a tour he abandoned early due to personality conflicts within the crack 11-piece ensemble that he'd taken on the road with him. The album's title? The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life.

There's nothing to suggest a mid-season disbandment of IndyCar is on the horizon, but the prospect of a great show that nobody sees looms as large as ever.

The series' TV ratings continue to decline year on year, although new spearhead Mark Miles does have a plan to try to arrest the slide. It's not universally popular, as Mario Andretti will tell you, but more on that later.

Depending upon whom you ask, the ongoing slump is either one of motorsport's biggest mysteries, or one of the greatest-ever indictments upon a marketing department, because even as the numbers plunge, the standard of racing remains unrivalled by any single-seater championship on the planet.

For those who do tune in, the rewards promise to be even richer this year. The era of two dominant teams is clearly over. For starters, Andretti Autosport has rejoined the Team Penske/Chip Ganassi Racing orbit over the past couple of seasons.

And second, one of the lessons from 2013 was that all of the three biggest teams can be taken down by someone smaller on any given weekend, and the weekend after that as well.

Pagenaud proved you don't need to be in a massive team to thrive © LAT

For proof, you need look no further than the fact that Schmidt Peterson's Simon Pagenaud finished ahead of the Andretti team's Ryan Hunter-Reay, Penske star Will Power and Ganassi hero Dario Franchitti in the 2013 standings.

Of those three, Franchitti is the one who would most like a shot at redemption after a frustrating 2013; a wish that his injury-enforced retirement has denied him.

The Scot's absence will be felt right through the sport, not least within Ganassi: a driver who is quick enough to win four titles and three Indianapolis 500s, while possessing the very precise blend of selflessness and self-confidence required to work completely openly with a team-mate as quick as Scott Dixon, does not come along every day.

So the loss of Franchitti immediately changes the dynamic of Ganassi's title campaign. The team has returned to a four-car operation for 2014 after scaling back to three for last year, and every one of those entries represents a subplot.

Tony Kanaan replaces Franchitti in the storied #10 entry, putting the Brazilian onto the team's frontline alongside Dixon.

Managing director Mike Hull told AUTOSPORT at the end of last year that "the Indy 500 is the pinnacle for our team", so on that basis, adding the reigning Indy winner to the line-up makes sense. But it's worth remembering that, prior to Franchitti's retirement, Kanaan was earmarked for the team's fourth car.

Kanaan is getting used to Target colours © LAT

Stepping into Franchitti's #10 carries a different kind of baggage to the #8 entry that he was originally assigned, and one of the Brazilian's first tasks will be to prove that he is versatile enough, and consistent enough, to be an effective wingman for Dixon's bid for a second successive title. Kanaan will insist that he's a championship contender himself and, if that's the case, then all the better for Ganassi.

Then there's Charlie Kimball, maybe the most improved driver of 2013. The American earned his first career win at Mid-Ohio, but he was equally as demonstrative at Fontana, where he looked completely at home running in the lead pack as the final chapter of the championship battle between Dixon and Helio Castroneves played out around him before his engine broke.

While Kanaan will fill the seat left vacant by Franchitti, the hole in Ganassi's driver line-up has been plugged by Ryan Briscoe, who gets a chance to return to the series full-time after being cut loose by Penske at the end of 2012.

The Australian has priors with Ganassi - he spent his first IndyCar season with the team in 2005, and returned for a cameo in a fourth car at Indy last year.

Briscoe had to settle for a part-season with Panther last year © LAT

It's not unfair to suggest that Briscoe still has a couple of questions to answer, although he's also demonstrated that he can get the job done when the circumstances are right. That his Indy outing was reinforced with several appearances with Panther Racing during 2013 means that his single-seater chops have remained honed during his year-long sidetrip into the world of sportscars.

Forming a backdrop to Ganassi's driver shake-up is a broader change. One of the great co-conspirators to Franchitti's success with the team was Honda, but this year the team's cars will take to the track with a different badge on the nose for the first time in eight years.

That badge will be the Bow Tie of Chevrolet, meaning that Ganassi will race with the same engines as Penske. Team owner Chip Ganassi was quick to aim a spotlight toward what he considered to be Honda's shortcomings when the team got off to a slow start last year, and this switch removes one major variable between two of the series' giants - and takes with it a potential avenue for excuses. (For all the early finger-pointing, it's worth remembering that Honda ultimately took Dixon to the drivers' championship, although Chevy won the manufacturers' title).

Turning away from the engine that just earned you the drivers' title might seem a bold move on Ganassi's part, and initially it created the illusion of a crisis for the Japanese manufacturer: when Ganassi's decision to decamp was announced in Houston, Honda did not have another team with title-winning credentials on its books for 2014.

At that point it had already signed a contract extension with Schmidt to help with the early track-testing of its new engine but, as good as Pagenaud is, he couldn't have been expected to carry all of Honda's title hopes on his own.

Here's where the 'illusion' part comes in: while Chevrolet now had Penske and Ganassi locked down for 2014, fellow Chevy team Andretti was yet to sign a new engine deal.

At the time, the story was sometimes spun around Honda's need to convince Andretti to change camps but, when you consider that Andretti's alternative was to risk becoming third in Chevy's pecking order behind Penske and Ganassi, it becomes clear that the team and Honda needed each other just as much. A deal seemed inevitable, and indeed was announced just a short time later.

Hinchcliffe took some brilliant wins, but was not consistent enough for a title shot © XPB

Of the series' three biggest teams, Andretti is the one with the most to prove in 2014 after a wall-punchingly inconsistent '13. Things started well enough: James Hinchcliffe opened the season in St Petersburg with his maiden win and added another two at Sao Paulo and Iowa Speedway, but he drifted off the map as the year progressed and finished eighth.

Life wasn't much easier for reigning champion Hunter-Reay, who endured a baffling array of mishaps en route to seventh in the points. That left Marco Andretti in fifth as the team's highest-placed driver; a story in itself when you consider how disastrous his 2012 campaign had been.

Perversely, Andretti was the only one of his dad's team's three frontline drivers not to win a race in 2013, although he was also the only one to produce anything resembling a steady level of performance: he failed to finish inside the top 10 just four times. A big part of the team's story in 2014 will revolve around the extent to which Marco can carry last year's form through the winter and into St Petersburg.

Another part of the story will be the fourth car; both what it is, and what it might have been. EJ Viso has made way for rookie Carlos Munoz, who caught the attention of many with his heroics in Andretti's fifth car at the Indy 500.

With a reputation for being fast but unrefined, commentary of his pace during the opening practice days frequently carried the caveat that he'd inevitably overextend himself at some point and hit the wall.

Instead, he qualified the thing on the front row, and kept his composure throughout the race to finish second.

Munoz was sensational at Indy and impressive in Toronto © XPB

Less heralded, but almost as impressive, was his performance in Toronto. The hand injury sustained by Briscoe during the Saturday race left Panther Racing scrambling for a driver for Sunday. In classic 'just-happened-to-be-at-the-track-with-my-helmet' style, Munoz earned the call-up, and made it to the finish despite never having driven an IndyCar on a road or street course.

For all the promise though, there were occasions in Indy Lights that made it clear that he is not quite the finished product yet. Andretti has some work to do with the youngster, but the payoff could eventually be great.

One reason that the young Colombian gets his opportunity this year, however, is that another Colombian was unavailable, and this guy blew into a silly-season soap opera in miniature.

The news from Ganassi's NASCAR arm that Juan Pablo Montoya would not be retained in 2014 immediately kicked the IndyCar rumour mill into overdrive, and Andretti Autosport owner Michael Andretti was the most overt in making kissy-faces in the direction of the former CART champion and Indy 500 winner.

In mid-August, a week after Montoya's split from Ganassi was confirmed, Andretti told the Associated Press that the two had spoken, and that a deal "just comes down to sponsorship". Fast-forward three weeks and the team was still sounding confident, reporting that it had "about 50 per cent" of the budget needed to bring Montoya into the fold. One week after that, it was announced that Montoya had signed for Penske.

Penske won the race for Montoya © LAT

On the surface, it looked like Andretti had simply been outsmarted. While it searched for the money to run Montoya, Penske's Tim Cindric cheerfully admitted that his team had simply focused on getting Montoya locked down first. Minor trivialities, like how to actually pay for him, could be figured out later.

But you could also question whether Montoya was playing Andretti all along. Cindric said that Penske's first contact with the Colombian was at Michigan in mid-August, around the time that Andretti first reached out. But speaking at the time his Penske deal was announced, Montoya made it sound like his mind had been made up even as Andretti was scrambling for backers.

"If you really dream of any ideal position for a driver, racing for Penske would be number one," he said at the time. "When I heard that I wasn't going to be in the #42 [NASCAR] next year, my number-one choice was going to be in a winning car. When this opportunity came around, I didn't even have to think about it."

Montoya's arrival, which takes Penske back to three full-time cars this year, is the only real change to what is otherwise the least disrupted of the big teams. Power and Castroneves are still there, as are Chevrolet, all of the key staff, and - maddeningly, if you work for the team - the perennial question over whether it can finally shake off the bridesmaid tag and win another championship.

Viewed independently, all of these developments across the paddock promise to add intrigue to the coming season. Viewed collectively, and the prospects for the 2014 championship fight loom immense: four Ganassi cars, four from Andretti and three fielded by Penske, all capable of winning. And that's before the quickest of the smaller teams are factored in.

The Indianapolis road course race has divided opinion © LAT

The battleground is similar to last year's, with a few key differences: Baltimore and Sao Paulo are gone, robbing the series of two of its best street circuit events, and in their place will be the first IndyCar race on the Indianapolis road course.

This and the ultra-compressed schedule - the entire 18-race calendar is fought out within just five months - are both part of Miles's broader plan to reiginite mainstream interest in the series.

This second race at Indy, so the theory goes, exploits the huge recognition levels enjoyed by the Speedway; the compact calendar is aimed at helping casual fans to work out when the next race is.

A desire to avoid a repeat of the political bickering that has helped define recent IndyCar seasons has prompted many paddock figures to adopt a wait-and-see approach to the plans, although Mario Andretti was not shy to voice his displeasure in a recent issue of AUTOSPORT.

"Why doesn't [Miles] pay attention to things that have actually worked," he said of the Indy road-course race. "If F1 can't make it work on the road course, nothing will."

Whether Miles's vision or Mario's concerns prove triumphant will be just one more facet to what is shaping up to be an extraordinary year, even by the high standards of a series well-accustomed to intrigue. The real question is how effectively IndyCar can leverage it.

Like the tree falling in a forest, if a championship season is a blinder but nobody tunes in, did it really happen?

This article originally appeared in the January 16 issue of AUTOSPORT magazine