IndyCar
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The Begining
American Open Wheel racing dates back as far as the early 1900's. In 1909 the American Automobile Association (AAA) established the national driving championship and became the first sanctioning body for auto racing in the United States. The first races for the Vanderbilt Cup were raced on the streets of Long Island until 1911.
USAC
In 1956, the United States Automobile Club (USAC) was founded to take over sanctioning from the AAA which ceased sanctioning auto racing in the general outrage over motor racing safety that followed the Pierre Levegh disaster at Le Mans Sarthe. USAC controlled the championship until 1979. In that year, CART began operating its own competing series, which quickly became dominant.
CART
The split away from USAC in 1979 was spurred by a group of activist car owners who had grown disenchanted with what they saw as an inept sanctioning body. Complaining of poor promotion and small purses, this group coalesced around Dan Gurney, who, in early 1978, wrote what came to be known as the "Gurney White Paper", the blueprint for an organization called Championship Auto Racing Teams. Gurney took his inspiration from the improvements Bernie Ecclestone had forced on Formula 1 with his creation of the Formula One Constructors Association. The white paper called for the owners to form CART as an advocacy group to promote USAC's national championship, doing the job where the sanctioning body wouldn't. The group would also work to negotiate television rights and race purses, and ideally hold seats on USAC's governing body.
Gurney, joined by other leading team owners including Roger Penske and Pat Patrick, took their demands to USAC's board and were turned down flat. This rejection turned disenchantment into defiance. In 1979, the rebel team owners laid plans to run CART, their own racing series, competing with the established USAC National Championship. The new series quickly gained the support of the vast majority of USAC Champ Car team and track owners, with the only notable holdout being A.J. Foyt.
As the morning of March 11, 1979 dawned, the open-wheel landscape had been transformed. The formerly all-powerful USAC was left with a slim, hodge-podge schedule of seven races, while CART could lay claim to the sport's notable drivers and tracks—except Foyt and Indianapolis. On that day, CART—sanctioned then by the Sports Car Club of America—dropped the green flag on its very first race, the Arizona Republic/Jimmy Bryan 150 at Phoenix International Raceway. Gordon Johncock would claim the checkered flag, but it was Rick Mears who would go on to capture the inaugural CART championship. USAC's competing championship was dominated by Foyt, but it would be the last National Championship for both the driver and the sanctioning body, as USAC relented at the end of the season and folded its National Championship Trail.
CART, like its predecessor USAC, was dominated by North American drivers until the 1990s. Many road-racing stars, including Mario Andretti, Bobby Rahal, and Danny Sullivan found success in the then-PPG IndyCar World Series. After former F1 champion Emerson Fittipaldi won the series title in 1989, the floodgates of talented South American and European drivers began to open. These pilots discovered that competing in Champ Car could often be more lucrative than an average career in F1 and consequently there was an increased presence of non-US drivers (from mainly F1 and the European Formula 3000).
After British driving star Nigel Mansell's successful battle with Emerson Fittipaldi for the 1993 World Championship, a lot of people interpreted his victory as evidence of the superiority of non-US drivers.
"The Split"
This, combined with CART's move to include more road racing on the schedule, led to a split of the series after the 1995 season due to a dispute between egos at CART and Tony George, owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. George went on to form a new racing series, the Indy Racing League (IRL), which initially included an all-oval schedule, all races on US soil, and mostly American drivers.
In the early years of the split, CART seemed to be dominant. It controlled most of the races and most of the "name" drivers, while George's primary asset was Indianapolis Motor Speedway and its 500. The first IRL schedule consisted of only four races, including the 500, and most of the drivers, even in the Indy 500, were virtual unknowns. In 1996 CART attempted to create a rival showcase event, the U.S. 500, at Michigan International Speedway on the same day as the Indy 500, which was discontinued after 1999.
In 2000, CART designated the Vanderbilt Cup as its series championship trophy.
Hurt by the defection of several top teams to the IRL, CART went bankrupt during the 2003 offseason, and shares of the stock were worth only 25 cents. The assets of CART were liquidated and put up for sale. Tony George made a bid for the company in an attempt to bury the series once and for all, while a trio of CART owners (Gerald Forsythe, Paul Gentilozzi, and Kevin Kalkhoven) also made a bid, calling their group the Open Wheel Racing Series (OWRS). In the end, a judge ruled that the OWRS group should be the purchaser of CART, which ensured a 25th anniversary season in 2004, running as Champ Car.
Champ Car World Series
The Champ Car World Series (CCWS) launched onto the scene in 2004 following the outcome of the CART bankrupcy hearing with new owners Kevin Kalkhoven, Jerry Forsythe, Paul Gentilozzi and Dan Pettit. The latter of whom was a business partner of Kalkhovens and up until this point had kept his involvement with the purchase of the series fairly quiet. For four years they ran the series with some of the traditional CART events along with developing new events at San Jose, Edmonton and Mont Tremblant. However what many saw as bad management decisions, coupled with declining grids and dwindling sponsors saw the series struggle and in February 2008 Kalkhoven and Forsyth, the two majority owners of the series, struck a deal with [{Tony George]] that would see the end of the bitter 13 year split in IndyCars.
Indy Racing League
details will appear here
End of the Split
On 23rd February 2008 it was announced that the owners of the Champ Car and IRL had signed an agreement to merge the two series with affect from 2008. The current (2008 spec) IRL chassis and engine would be used in the new IndyCar series and most of the IRL's schedule would be used with the addition of a few key Champ Car races. As the deal was struck late in the day for the 2008 season a lot of scheulded 2008 Champ Car races would be cancelled, aolthough the owners did not rule out their return in 2009 when the schedule would be looked at with a clean sheet of paper. This agreement brought to an end the split in American Open Wheel racing which had lasted 13 years.
Indy Car going Forward
details will appear here
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