Done Deal

[FlatChatRacer]

FCR, Mr. Gentilozzi brought us the Motorock debacle, the Puerto Rico race debacle, the Las Vegas race debacle, killed the Trans-Am Series after he won enough races to break Donohue's record and has been reported to be a rather slow pay on his bills......read earlier that he owed Tagliani from three years ago. Plus apparently, his contacts within the industry led him to a skin mag sponsorship that Forsythe killed out of poor taste. He had musical drivers with musical money throughout the four years of CC, in and out of the seats regularly. If that's considered "blight" by some, I can understand.

Indycool,

Thank you for that. Interesting how we can have different perceptions of people. When I was trying to put a deal together between my bank and Champ Car, Paul Gentilozzi was one the person's who we dealt with.

He was very friendly and amiable. He was never rude to us.

[BenRoethig]

Might yet be. Let's see where this goes in a few years. If they get good sponsor money and another engine builder and if they start cranking up the RPMs again and open the rules a bit to attract bright engineers, who knows?

The reason they couldn't get those is beacause the continent Champ Car did most of racing on was not interested in a european-type open wheel series which is what Champ Car (not CART) was. If NASCAR was to buy say DTM and then change to conform to more or less the rules of the cup series, get rid of most of the road courses, and then replace all the drivers with either developmental drivers or washouts does anyone think it would stand a remote chance of suceeding? The reason Champ car didn't have sponsors because it just wasn't a viable series the way they wanted to run it.

My perspective is that the IRL did not win a war...and CC did not lose a war...but that they just saved each other's lives.

Oh, they lost the war big time, so did CART, and so did Tony George. When it comes right down to it neither the IRL as orignally concieved nor Champ as run the last couple of years had any business existing. When it comes right down to it, the last 12 years has been about
arrogance and egos. Tony was arrogant enought to think he could sell a big spring car series and the three amigos were arrogant enough to think they could succeed where everyone else, including Bernie had failed miserably. In all cases, the verdict was clear, with the exception of the Indy500, American Open Wheel fans didn't want what either party was trying to sell.

In the end we lost our fan base, sponsors, manufactuers, Tony Stewart, Casey Mears, A.J. Allmendinger, Kasey Kahne, Sam Hornish, Dario Franchitti, the returns of Jaques Villenuve and Juan Montoya, and quite possibly Scott Speed. The France family and NASCAR got them all and are laughing all the way to the bank about it.