Ask Gordon: February 14

Dear Gordon,
Winter testing in the United States has shown those cheeky upstarts from the IRL to be nearly matching - and in one case actually beating - the times set by Champ cars on the same tracks. Isn't this rather dangerous for Champ car? After all, an IRL series with the Indy 500, more US drivers AND faster cars would seem to be capable of calling all the shots when it came to sponsors and TV. Your thoughts please Gordon.
Andrew Dawson, Toronto, Canada

Dear Andrew,
Aahh! Such a desultory topic. You have to excuse me. Where to begin? First of all, I believe the split between the IRL and CART cannot be repaired. Tony George wants to be the king of Indy car racing, and he does not believe in an owners-operated or controlled organisation. Now that he has F1 and NASCAR at his track he considers himself, and may well be, the world's most complete racing promoter, so as far as he's concerned he's made CART irrelevant at Indianapolis.

But I believe George does have a problem with the IRL. The Indy 500 is now just one of three races at the Speedway and no longer has anything like the cachet it used to have. More important, regardless of lap speed comparisons, the IRL has a tiny following, much smaller than CART at its worst. Sure, there are some true-blue IRL devotees, but the series is sadly small-time, pulling weak crowds at best everywhere it goes outside Indianapolis.

The IRL is what it is: a second-level or even lower type of racing that is quite competitive and happy for those involved, but lacking in top class drivers, teams or cars. You may have noticed the serious lack of name brand sponsors in the IRL and that is because the series pulls small crowds with weak demographics and because the races do not have the feel of high quality events. I've heard complaints about this from many corporate types who have taken a look at the IRL. From engine manufacturers to tobacco people, sponsors have little or no interest in the IRL.

It's deeply ironic as well, that the very aspect that Tony George professed to save by inventing the IRL - the oval racing side of Indy or Champ car racing - is the very part that has been most seriously damaged by the split. CART's road courses and street circuits in particular, remain very healthy with big crowds and lots of local media interest, but the ovals tracks, whether they're running CART or IRL, are struggling. Indy 500 aside, the only really successful Indy/Champ car oval race is CART's Marlboro 500 at the California Speedway. Clearly, the split and the drumbeat of political squabbling over many years has turned-off the oval fans. As everyone knows, the serious oval fan has become a NASCAR devotee, almost to the exclusion of Indy or Champ cars.

Some people in CART talk about giving up on ovals entirely and focusing on road and street racing. They say it would raise the profile, give it a better cachet, but I don't believe at all in pulling out of the ovals. It's the great variety of tracks from superspeedways to street circuits that makes CART special, separating Champ car racing from F1, NASCAR and the IRL, each in their own separate ways.

As far as your point about lap speeds is concerned, the IRL has gone for a low-tech, low-power, high-downforce combination while CART remains roughly the opposite with more horsepower than downforce. You'll notice that IRL cars take all kinds of lines around any racetrack. That's because they are a like a Formula Ford for superspeedway racing, underpowered and unexciting as Juan Montoya discovered last year. Indy cars are supposed to be overpowered for the amount of grip or downforce they make, which is what a CART car remains, although the need to control speeds on ovals is pushing CART closer to the IRL equation.

The fact is CART, the IRL, and USAC before them, have been trying to limit speeds for almost 30 years, since Bobby Unser and Jerry Grant turned the first 200mph laps at the old Ontario Motor Speedway in 1972. New track records are things of the past, as they are in NASCAR where everything has been sold for years on the basis of close competition rather than stunning speeds. And of course, that too is the chief selling point these days for CART and the IRL.

As far as attracting sponsors and drawing bigger TV audiences, both CART and the IRL have a lot of work to do. As I say, thanks to the road races and street races and one or two oval races, CART presents the right show to the right audience to keep the sponsors interested. The IRL is really struggling in this regard and the lack of name brand sponsors tells the story. Comparable speeds with CART or not, I don't see that changing.




Dear David,
Ongais was one of the most unbelievably brave drivers I've ever seen. He started in drag racing, tried and failed to break into Indy cars in the Sixties, then got a second chance 10 years later with the outrageously wealthy Ted Field's Interscope team. He also raced with Field in IMSA, winning quite a few races, Daytona 24 hours included, in a series of Porsche 935s. He was superb in John Barnard's Parnelli-Cosworth in 1977 and '78, winning five races in '78, but there were times when he was, as you say, just plain reckless.

Danny's career came to grief at Indianapolis in 1982 when he crashed the Roman Slobodynskyj-designed Interscope, badly breaking both legs. He came back however, racing again the following year. Later, in 1987 at Indy again, another accident, this time during practice in a Penske paid for by Field, effectively ended his career, although he actually ran a couple of IRL races a few years ago with a view to racing again at Indy. By this time he was well into his fifties.

Ongais was and is a man of few words. He spoke very quietly, very self-consciously, but could be piercing in identifying very specific things either technically about the car, or about people or politics, which he stayed away from like the plague. From Hawaii, Ongais started racing dragsters on the island, then moved to California to pursue his career. The fans took to calling him Danny On-the-gas, and he was something else to watch when he was in full flight.

I remember a USAC race at Mosport in 1978, I think, when he took the pole and then crashed. He had already beaten team mate Al Unser by about a second, but kept going, intent on going even faster, for his own personal satisfaction. Going into Mosport's turn right, a very fast and long, right-hander at the top of the track's backstraight - the Mario Andretti Straight they call it - he refused to lift, or certainly didn't lift enough, and got into a classic, long, lurid, oversteering moment, before going off and destroying the car.

He scrambled out of the wreckage none the worse for wear, a little shaken, but nothing more, and as quiet and dismissive as ever about what had happened. The next day, in a spare car, he won the race. That was Ongais at his best.




Dear Vincent,
There's no question that Dale Jr is a very talented and high-spirited driver. I'm in Daytona for the 500 as I write and can assure you that Junior has many fans! Red #8 Budweiser caps and T-shirts are everywhere around town. His speed, name, and modern-youth style have quickly made him one of NASCAR's biggest stars. Now he has to deliver over the long haul.

I don't know Dale Jr at all, but there's no doubt that he lives life to the full, as he should. He's a big rock 'n roll fan and player, and I'm told he's a fine fellow to party with. Not to be a stick in the mud, but I believe he will have to bridle himself a little and live a slightly more restrained life if he's to achieve anything like the success of his very tough-minded father. If he has the kind of discipline inside himself, Dale Jr has a huge future.




Dear George,
Always an intriguing idea, although the financial and political realities of life have always kept it strictly in the realm of the imagination, which is too bad I believe. For many years, no less a man than Dan Gurney championed this idea. Dan believed it would create a true World Champion and make the sport bigger around the world and in the USA. Dan thought there would be an overall World Championship and at least two regional series, one in Europe and another in the United States.

I have always agreed with Dan, and many years ago wrote about the idea a few times. The last time I recall putting it forward was in about 1988 and I remember Rick Galles, a top CART team owner at the time, saying: "That's the craziest thing you ever wrote!" It's too bad it's such an apparent impossibility because I think Dan is right in thinking it would make the sport much bigger.

How would you do it? You would have to create a car that was suitable to all types of racetracks, ovals included. That would be the tough part. In many ways, CART is already the perfect hybrid series. It's really a mixture of the old SCCA CanAm series and USAC's Championship series in terms of tracks, teams and drivers. It was created and took shape because of the failure of those two series, and the rules have been developed over many years primarily to attempt to restrain speeds on the superspeedways in particular and to make the cars safer on the fastest tracks. A Formula 1 car is not designed to hit a wall at 230mph. A Champ car is.

Of course, the perfect hybrid series would also have one NASCAR-style stock car race, to test the 'drafting' skills of the drivers, and one long-distance sports car race to test their mettle overnight and through the often lamentable misery of those races. So you would need at least three different types of cars for the job. This surely is an idea to challenge the Barnum & Bailey skills of Bernie Ecclestone and Bill France in their dotage!

I wonder what my friend Nigel Roebuck has to say about this idea?




Dear Jamie,
Juan is an amazing talent, as the F1 world is about to discover. He's as talented as any driver I've seen, Gilles Villeneuve included. I watched Gilles come up through Formula Fords and Formula Atlantic and it was always a pleasure to watch and cover him. He drove with such passion and commitment and Juan is exactly the same. Except that he is more talented than Gilles! He is not only stupefyingly fast, but he's amazingly tidy and precise, more in the Jim Clark mould than anything else.

Juan also has absolute confidence in his ability and an extremely playful nature. He's still just a kid in many ways, delighted to be able to do the thing he loves. He appears not to have to pump himself up or motivate himself like many drivers. It all seems to come very naturally. He just jumps in and goes and is incredibly strong mentally. I've never seen him set back or perturbed.

Right from the start Juan impressed with his incredible reactions and ability to drive an oversteering car. He did that in his first Champ car race on the Homestead oval in 1999 because he didn't know any better. But he hung on spectacularly well. Then in Japan he crashed with Michael Andretti in practice and was unrepentant about it. We thought he was too cock-sure and that trouble loomed ahead, but he drove a superb race, coming through from the midfield to lead, and probably would have won had Chip Ganassi not tried to run him one lap too long so that he ran out of fuel.

The following weekend at Long Beach I was totally convinced by Juan when I went out to watch practice. Almost right away, on a track he'd never driven, he was on the throttle at the apex to a typical, ninety-degree, wall-lined street circuit corner about two or three car lengths earlier than anybody else! I couldn't believe it, but after more deliberate, more specific spectating at a few different corners it was clear that I was watching a talent in the Clark-Villeneuve category.

There are so many other memories of him. Watching practice at Cleveland last year at the end of a very fast, long right-hander leading onto the front straight, Juan was mind-boggling to watch, hanging onto a couple of big oversteering slides that seemed to get away from him once or twice each time through. Later, when he got the car right, he was just smooth, tidy and blindingly fast.

There was also that superb battle to the flag with Michael Andretti in last year's Michigan 500. You will not see a better race than that and Juan showed his mental strength by toughing it out with Michael side-by-side through the last turn, and then used the tow from Tarso Marques' lapped car to edge ahead on the final run to the flag. As he said at the time, he didn't care if he ran into the back of Marques, he was going to win the race.

At Milwaukee last year I witnessed a small vignette that perhaps best describes Juan. The race had been rained-out on Sunday so we were back at the track on Monday morning. A half-hour warm-up had just finished and the race was going to take place after another half-hour, forty-five minutes maximum. In the warm-up Juan had run two fresh sets of tyres and his car had understeered on one set and oversteered on the other. Team mate Jimmy Vasser had blown an engine in his car and because Jimmy had crashed his spare on Saturday his mechanics were busy fitting Vasser to Montoya's spare car while Juan's car was rolled onto the scales to see of a solution could be found to the difference in tyre performance in the warm-up.

Ganassi's garage area was fraught with activity. Everybody was fully occupied and Chip was standing off to the side, almost apoplectic. I walked in and asked Chip what on earth was going on and he stood there barely able to speak. As Chip struggled for words Juan came bounding over flashing that brilliant white smile of his.

"What's up?" he grinned. "I'm supposed to be asking you," I said. "Oh, you want to hear about problems?" Juan said, assuming a half-mocking expression. "We've got problems. My car pushes on one set of tyres and is loose on the other, and Jimmy's blown an engine. We've got problems everywhere, haven't we Chip?"

He turned to Ganassi, again flashing that brilliant smile. "Don't worry Chip," he slapped Ganassi on the arm. "We'll be OK! The car will be fine in the race. We're going to win!"

Then he bounded off again, over to his car where he walked around the backs of his mechanics, encouraging them, asking if there was anything he could do. And then he went out and won the race.

So, like I say to people, the Schumacher brothers better be prepared. They've never seen or raced against anyone quite like Juan...




Dear Michael,
It is a very interesting ruling and on the face of it should benefit CART. But I don't see CART going to any classic overseas road courses like those you mention, unless these tracks lose their F1 dates of course. Then it might get interesting.

Back in 1994 and '95, when they were in CART, Craig Pollock and Jacques Villeneuve used to go on about CART's naivety in not going head-to-head with Bernie and Max. The good Craig and Jacques believed CART should try to race at any quality international venue that F1 might have walked away from.

The belief in CART however is that the number of international races is just about right and that two races in Europe are all the series can fit in. Most people also believe the right thing to do is to race on ovals overseas, in Europe in particular, to clearly differentiate Champ car racing from F1.

The other point is that everyone is aware of the need to make Champ car stronger at home, on the ovals in particular where it has lost so much ground in recent years. The general belief in CART, and I think new boss Joe Heitzler thinks along the same lines, is that CART should work with the FIA and Formula 1 whenever possible to compliment each other rather than drawing any battle lines.