After years of arguing, the open wheel split is over. According to Robin Miller at SpeedTV.com, the Indy Racing League and the Champ Car World Series have mended their differences and will run the 2008 season as a single race series.
“I’m supposed to fly in Indy later this week to get fitted for a seat and then we’re going to have to thrash to make it to the first test in Homestead,” Paul Tracy told Miller. “We don’t have any experience with those Dallaras and we’re going to need all the practice we can get but this is definitely the best thing that can happen for open-wheel racing.”
Most will speculate that the reason for this merger was more about Champ Car not being able to answer the bell for the 2008 season than about the two sides actually coming to their senses. The fact is that if Champ Car had been a successful business they would not have begun negotiating with their arch-rival Tony George. But for whatever reason, this news will be welcomed by many US race fans and it will surely have reverberations through the US racing scene and beyond.
The Champ Car schedule has been reduced due to the need to cancel races in many parts of their international tour to accommodate the merged schedules. This will also give a new energy to this year’s Indy 500 with added teams and more cars - perhaps even re-energizing the famed bump-day.
This is also the first season in many years that the US open wheel season will not include a visit from Bernie Ecclestone’s Formula 1 Series. 2007 was the last year of the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and news of the merger will not be good for the Formula 1 manufacturers who were not pleased when Ecclestone removed the US Grand Prix from the F1 schedule and departed the world’s largest automotive buyers market.
If the reports are true, and the two series are in fact merged, then we can expect to soon see an interesting news conference where the two sides will do their best to ensure the former Champ Car owners are presented as co-equal partners and not as the ones on the side that lost.
Stay tuned.
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