What was US racing's greatest era?

If you were to judge by the quality of the racing alone, you could make a strong case for current-era IndyCar being the best single-seater championship on the planet right now.

The problem is that it's chasing a ghost; a memory of a time in the tantalisingly recent past when single-seater racing in the US was viewed - with some justification - as a legitimate threat to Formula 1 in the battle for the hearts and minds of motorsport fans.

That period of demonic cars, plentiful sponsorships, strong TV and race attendances, and Zanardi doughnuts eventually fell victim to its own history as the full ramifications of the split with the Indy Racing League became felt. Just 10 years after CART/Champ Car's heyday the series had ceased to exist; absorbed into the folds of its former rival and reinvented as the IndyCar Series we know today.

So began what has proven to be a slow and painful recovery. Commercial and fan support of current IndyCar is still nowhere close to those of CART's golden years, although there have been encouraging signs of growth this season. And while the DW12 does deliver great racing, the drivers are not trying to tame 1000bhp of wheelspin. And let's face it, the car looks kind of weird.

So was the US open-wheeler world really a better place during the CART years?

DRIVERS
CART 4/5
INDYCAR 5/5

If you were to pitch the best of the CART years against the best of today, you'd be settling in to watch a heck of a fight. Indeed, there's quite a lot of overlap: Dario Franchitti, Tony Kanaan and Juan Pablo Montoya top the list of those whose careers straddled both eras.

Vasser had to defeat Andretti and Unser to become 1996 champion © LAT

So then you look a little deeper. Michael Andretti had an almost supernatural sense for how to go fast in CART machinery, as did Alex Zanardi. Then there was Al Unser Jr, who was capable of making his rivals feel half-beaten merely by qualifying on the first two rows.

The CART generation's future also loomed bright. In addition to the youngsters of the time who subsequently flourished, there were others who never got the chance. Greg Moore's talent continues to be hailed by those who raced against him, and Jeff Krosnoff was only narrowly beaten to a Ganassi drive by Zanardi.

But then, the modern grid is pretty good, too. In the absence of Andretti, Al Jr and Jimmy Vasser we have the likes of Will Power, Simon Pagenaud and Ryan Hunter-Reay, and a strong crop of promising youngsters that includes Andretti rookie Carlos Munoz and, waiting in the wings, Ganassi development driver Sage Karam. Both are on the threshold of exciting careers, and they are joined in the youth brigade by the likes of Josef Newgarden and Jack Hawksworth.

The real differentiator between then and now lies not in the quality of the field, but in the depth of the talent. And in that regard, the current grid wins. In short: the back three rows of the present field would comfortably shade the corresponding cars from the mid-1990s.

"The field today has no makeweights in it," says Franchitti. "It's really strong. Guys like [Mikhail] Aleshin, who is technically paying for his drive, he's bloody good. There's nobody in there who wouldn't deserve to be there if they couldn't pay. They're all of a very high level.

"Even back then [in CART] there were a couple of makeweights, but you did have some incredible guys at the front."

COST
CART 4/5
INDYCAR 3/5

This is a tricky one, because to paraphrase a well-known saying, something is only expensive if you can't afford it.

Rahal's National Guard backing is one of 2014's bigger deals © LAT

Side-by-side, the annual single-car budgets for a mid-1990s CART team versus that of a modern IndyCar outfit are not that far apart, allowing for inflation.

A CART team could go racing for $6m-$10m; Rahal Letterman Lanigan's National Guard backing for this year, which is considered one of the more lucrative deals in the paddock, is worth $12m. And it's certainly possible to run a competitive car for less.

The ways in which all this money is spent varies enormously between the eras, which we'll cover in a moment. But the real difference between then and now was the size of sponsorships.

Compared to today, the mid-1990s CART paddock was awash with money. Like F1, the US was enjoying the benefits of unrestricted tobacco marketing, but there was also heavy team investment from manufacturers and lucrative deals from outside companies. The five-year, $75 million deal that Newman/Haas signed with Texaco back in the CART days now seems about as viable as Charlie Kimball arriving at the track on a dragon.

CART certainly wasn't cheap. This was an era of chassis, tyre and engine wars, and competition means testing, which in turn means costs. And CART teams tested a lot.

But for the bigger teams in particular, this was often subsidised if, for example, it was a tyre test. And toward the end of the 1990s engines were often either free, or a source of revenue of the teams - manufacturers would actually pay the larger outfits to use their gear.

The next big outlay were the chassis, which were replaced every year. Assuming that a team bought three cars per entry, this could easily climb past the $1.5million mark each season. In the present day, where all of the teams having been using the same Dallara DW12 chassis since 2012, this cost is amortised across the lifespan of the car.

Tobacco sponsorship was still plentiful in the 1990s © LAT

Another substantial CART expense was salaries for the big-name drivers. IndyCar teams are discrete about what they pay their drivers, but it's safe to say that the days of a $3m-$5m annual retainer have been relegated to history.

Nowadays, engines and tyres are expenses that the teams are expected to absorb, and manufacturers are no longer permitted to offer direct financial support. A season-long IndyCar engine lease costs $690,000, while reports put the cost of tyres somewhere around $2600 per set.

Aero kits can be added to the shopping list next year, and other parts that teams formerly used to make or source themselves must now be purchased at a not inconsiderable cost from Dallara. On the flipside, testing is far more tightly controlled, and driver salaries are a fraction of what they once were.

This has some competition advantages: a less-resourced team has a far better chance of winning a race in IndyCar than it would have in Champ Car. But the bottom line is that sponsorships have failed to keep pace with costs, so the affordability of going racing now is measurably lower than it was 15 or 20 years ago.

CARS
CART: 5/5
INDYCAR 3/5

Poor IndyCar almost didn't bother turning up for this part. The DW12 is much safer than its CART forebears. But it's hard to convince people to pay to sit in the sun all day to watch 'safe', even if the standard of racing is better.

Montoya finds wrestling a 2014 car a different proposition © LAT

What they will pay to watch is a highly skilled driver hanging on for dear life while a 1000bhp carbonfibre bull does its best to throw him into the wall at 240mph.

"Those cars never, ever stopped accelerating," says Franchitti. "They just didn't."

Juan Pablo Montoya: "The current cars are fun to drive, but they are momentum cars. In CART, they were 'hang on' cars. We used to get to 250mph in the draft on the ovals, which was pretty amazing."

If we take Montoya's championship year in 1999 as a point of comparison, the numbers help tell the story. Will Power's pole position at Fontana last year was set at a two-lap average speed of 220.775mph. Scott Pruett's pole speed at the same track in '99: 235.732mph.

It gets a little more interesting when we move to road courses: Franchitti and Gil de Ferran share the 1m05.347s track record at Mid-Ohio; the duo having set the same time to earn pole in 1999 and 2000 respectively. Qualifying at that venue this year was wet, but Ryan Hunter-Reay's pole time from last year of 1m05.3519s is only the tiniest fraction off - and that was on a lap where he didn't get Turn 13 right.

The story is similar on the Long Beach street circuit. The layout was different prior to 2001, but in that year Helio Castroneves sat on pole with a time of 1m08.556s. And with that same lap time, he'd have started this year's race from 15th, 0.7s down on Hunter-Reay in P1.

So in pure speed terms, the DW12 can hold its own against a late-1990s CART car on a road and street course, but a comparison of 2001 pole times from Texas puts things back into perspective. Kenny Brack in '01: 233.344mph. Power in 2014: 218.896mph.

Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Brack never got a chance to capitalise on his starting position because the 2001 race was cancelled. The reason? Speeds were so high that drivers were getting dizzy.

The DW12's pace will pick up next year when the manufacturer body kits arrive, and IndyCar has medium-to-long term plans to increase speeds at the Indianapolis 500 with the ultimate aim of an assault on Arie Luyendyk's lap record.

too fast" width="275" height="213" border="0" data-mce-src="https://cdn.images.autosport.com/editorial/1408102739.jpg"> Texas 2001: When CART turned out to be too fast © LAT

"It will still be very spec with the aero kits, because you'll just have Chevy and Honda - half the field will be exactly the same," says Will Power.

"I'm looking forward to the kits though, just to make the cars look a bit better. I think they'll look cool with the new sidepods and everything. Right now they're a bit bulky. And the cars will be quite a bit faster."

All encouraging signs for those longing for an IndyCar with a little more bite. But in terms of sheer spectacle, it still won't compete with a Reynard loaded with a late-90s Honda engine and four sticky Firestones.

"[CART] cars were tricky things to drive," says Franchitti. "Now, the car is difficult to drive, but you can run it much more in yaw, and you can slide it. It's a bit more forgiving.

"Are they easy to drive? God no, but you can be much more aggressive with the set-up and your driving style. [But] those things - if they wiggled once and you didn't catch it then you were in the wall."

COMPETITION
CART 3/5
INDYCAR 5/5

IndyCar has been derided - including by some within its own paddock - for the fact that everyone is currently saddled with the same gear, engines aside. (Again, the arrival of manufacturer aero kits will help to address that).

But you never hear anyone complain about the racing. CART is spoken of in hushed tones, but not even those who made their name during that era try to claim that its reputation was built upon the standard of competition.

Champion Dixon and the mighty Ganassi had to wait until August to win this year © LAT

"I would say the racing wasn't as good as now," says Michael Andretti. "I was stuck with the wrong tyre for five years, and I think I lost a LOT of races that I could have won during that timespan. That was disappointing if you were on the wrong side of it.

"So from the driver standpoint that [openness] wasn't a good thing, because if you didn't have the good stuff, you weren't going to be able to get the results."

Franchitti agrees. "I think we look back with rose-tinted glasses," he says. "The racing is far better now."

CART was an era of great battles; of outstanding drivers doing something nail-biting for six or seven laps. IndyCar is an era of great races.

This year alone there have been 10 different winners from the first 15 starts. Six different teams earned wins before Ganassi broke its duck for the season. And Ganassi hasn't been awful this year. It's just that the competition is ridiculously close.

Here are some numbers to help illustrate the point. We've chosen 1994 and '99 at random to offer a snapshot of how competitive the CART field was, and then compared them with last year and this year (up to and including Mid-Ohio) in IndyCar.

The numbers are imperfect, not least because all of the wet/dry qualifying sessions this year, but they at least offer some idea of just how much the field has closed up.

1994
Average pole margin: 0.234s
Qualifying gap 1st-10th: 1.639s (road/street courses)
Qualifying gap 1st-10th: 1.033s (ovals)
Qualifying gap 1st-last: 4.879s (road/street courses)
Qualifying gap 1st-last: 2.521s (ovals)
Average winning margin: 10.040s

*Where a race was won by more than a lap, a median qualifying lap time was used to create an estimated margin of victory.

1999
Average pole margin: 0.182s
Qualifying gap 1st-10th: 0.989s (road/street courses)
Qualifying gap 1st-10th: 0.370s (ovals)
Qualifying gap 1st-last: 3.911s (road/street courses)
Qualifying gap 1st-last: 1.857s (ovals
Average winning margin: 4.155s

The racing was often close in the 1990s, but not as open © LAT

2013
Average pole margin: 0.2257s
Qualifying gap 1st-10th: 0.7433s (road/street courses)
Qualifying gap 1st-10th: 0.7414s (ovals)
Qualifying gap 1st-last: 2.2216s (road/street courses)
Qualifying gap 1st-last: 2.6025s (ovals)
Winning margin: 2.7135s

*The Iowa grid was set via a series of heat races, and was not included in the count.
**Qualifying for the second Houston race was cancelled and the grid set by championship standings.
***Race one qualifying in Detroit was wet then dry, which created too large a gap across the session to allow for a meaningful comparison.

2014
Average pole margin: 0.241s
Qualifying gap 1st-10th: 0.6648s (road/street courses)
Qualifying gap 1st-10th: 0.3963s (ovals)
Qualifying gap 1st-last: 1.3992s (road/street courses)
Qualifying gap 1st-last: 2.0316s (ovals)
Average winning margin: 1.994s

*Race two grid in Toronto was set by qualifying positions due to rain.
**St Petersburg, the Indianapolis road course race and Mid-Ohio qualifying was wet then dry, which created too large a gap across the sessions to allow for a meaningful comparison.
***Half of the field qualified in the wet for the second Houston race, so the 10th-fastest dry time was used.

As Montoya put it earlier this year: "In CART or F1, if you made a mistake in a corner [in qualifying] you'd lose a couple of tenths and be fifth or something. Here [in IndyCar], if you lose a couple of tenths, you're 15th. Like, you're REALLY 15th."

VERDICT
CART: 16/20
INDYCAR: 16/20

IndyCar 2014 is certainly eventful © LAT

Anyone who has sat through a rainy Tuesday night at Stoke for a 0-0 will tell you that there's nothing more frustrating than a draw. But the fact is that CART and IndyCar are the perfect fits for their respective eras.

CART flourished in an era that could tolerate excess and extravagance. You could bring the same technical regulations and suppliers back tomorrow, but you'd end up with a six-car field, and probably a performance differential even within that. If you want to know what that kind of race looks like, go and find footage of Formula 1's 2005 US Grand Prix.

CART would not be sustainable in the current environment, but for the years that it was, fans - and drivers - were treated to some of the most fantastic racecars ever built.

It was a great era for the highlight reel, both in plotlines (Nigel Mansell turning up as a cranky world champion in 1993 and winning the title) and in moments (Zanardi's famous pass on Bryan Herta at Laguna Seca's Corkscrew).

The DW12, meanwhile, looks like it has been on the cupcakes, but it has delivered on the majority of its objectives: it's quick on road and street courses, safer than its predecessor, and the racing has been of a quality that CART couldn't have hoped to match. The area most open to debate is whether it has achieved enough in the realm of cost-saving, but that is a separate article in itself.

The car sounds great; the 2.2-litre twin-turbo V6s delivering a hairy-chested bellow that would cause some blushes among its 2014-spec F1 counterparts, and the overall package will receive both an aesthetic and performance upgrade with the arrival of body kits next year.

Most importantly though, there are signs that the DW12 is delivering on its secret underlying mission of saving IndyCar.

For the first time in a long time, TV figures are on the upswing, and while they are still south of where they need to be, a 48 per cent climb over the first eight race weekends compared with last year is nothing to sneeze at.

For more stories from a great era of Indycar competition, take a look at the special August 14 issue of AUTOSPORT magazine, guest edited by Alex Zanardi.

The rise and fall of Indycar
How splits with the Indy 500 organisers helped create an iconic era, and then end it more than two decades later

Memories of a golden era
The drivers recall their best memories, and remember what it was like to driver the 1000bhp monsters

Ganassi becomes a US superteam
The story of Chip Ganassi's squad, as it became the dominant force in America during the 1990s

Top CART drivers
AUTOSPORT asked racers of the 1993-2001 era to pick out their top rivals, then added up the responses. Here's who came out on top...

Mansell on how he conquered America
The 1992 F1 world champion looks back at his 1993 Indycar success, and the troubles that followed

Great Car: Penske PC23
The machine that beat Mansell and put Penske back on top, with a little help from a special engine for the Indy 500

F1 refugees in America
A look at some of the ex-Formula 1 racers who tried their luck in the States, with varying success

Tributes to Moore, Krosnoff and Rodriguez
Memories of the three racing talents who lost their lives during the period