IRL/CART & F1

Sounds like Bernie has changed his tone today before the race. Let's hope they will be back next year.

 

one thing you should know about tony george.... HE IS THE BIGGEST NUT IN THE TOOL BOX.... IRL ChampCar merger would have been done 2 years ago if not for him.

Constantly says one thing privately then the opposite publicly... the IRL should never have been (him again) and this train wreck of open wheel racing in NA should not be in this mess (Caused by, created by and brought to you by the pickel king)

 

Can't really disagree about Mr. George, I don't know him, except that the debacle in US open wheel racing was not his fault. Blame it on the true problem, the original Champ Car group formed by Penske and Ganassi. They are now with the IRL because it is the strongest of the two, leaving Champ Car to struggle. George tried to buy champ Car a couple of year's ago, should have been allowed to do so by the courts.

Champ Car scheduled their first ever event at Michigan the same day as the Indy 500, ignoring the fact that race fans already paid their money for Indy tickets. Penske and Ganassi will always be the biggest jerks of racing in my book.

 

I don't know, Ron. Penske was one of the original founders of CART, but that was all the way back in 1979! This was long before Tony started acting like a bull in a china shop.

The only reason Andretti, Penske, Ganassi all went (eventually) to IRL was because Tony controls the most valuable racing real estate (next to Daytona <grin>) in the country, IMS, and their sponsors wanted them to go THERE! What is remarkable is that Tony insisted that people that wanted to run the Indy 500 HAD to commit to other rounds of the series to be eligible to enter, the first several years.

If Tony had succeeded in buying the assets of CART out of bankruptcy court, he would have killed it and left scorched earth, just to spite Gerry Forsythe. Thankfully, Kevin is a good guy and a visionary to boot. Thanks to him, there MAY be light at the end of the tunnel. Tony is just an egotistical loose cannon. All the IRL has done is eat away at the Hulman family fortune. We'll see, won't we...

 

Actually there is an interesting article in the RED BULLetin from Saturday: They mentioned that all those remarks by Bernie were just postering to squeeze the best deal out of Tony. In reality all the team bosses complained to Bernie for having made that statement, because F1 does need the US. So much, that they actually want a 2nd race.

Same article also goes on to explain that Indiana (if not the US) needs F1: It generates 100 million $ in revenue to an already sluggish economy. They're more than eager to keep the USGP at Indy.

Furthermore the article goes on to say that also George needs F1 because this third race a year helps him tremendously with the costs of maintaining his track.

It all makes sense.

PS: That RED BULLetin is hilarious. Totally love it. You should see the stuff they write about MS. One wouldn't believe Red Bull is powered by Ferrari. A refreshing journal in a PC world.

 

I can't add much to Lolaman's and writerguy's remarks, but they are right on. Fortunately, a real businessman is now running ChampCar, he's already shown how incompetent Tony George is during the CART bankruptcy proceedings. Kevin Kalkhoven seems to know that he's going to have to allow Geroge to save face to get any kind of merger done.

I don't think the F1 talks have anything to do with the merger talks. I think the merger talks have everything to do with the Hulman family concerned about seeing the family fortune flushed down the toilet so that Tony can keep his ego stroked.

 

Flashback to when this turd started to float and you might remember that the IRL ONLY had INDY and claimed to be set up for USA drivers to get a shot at the big show. Oval only format.
Well Flash forward and there is only 40 % of the field from the USA, Road corses are on the menue and the big draw from the beginning was that Tony and INDY had the rights to the ABC/ESPN contract. He leveraged the indy and held it hostage to get the rest of his races on the tube.

CART was formed in the wreckage of USAC sanctioning by Jim Hall, Carl Hass, Roger Penske, Pat Patrick and Dan Gurney.... the main drivers behind forming the series were patrick and penske...

When IRL spun off there was AJ Foyt and a bunch of cobbled together cars that got a lot of people killed and hurt badly.
Tony is a spoiled child who sooner or later will get someone else killed