IRL-CART: The numbers don’t lie. Can the merger work?

Four years and $100 million later, the once-majestic Champ Car World Series ended where it had started, at a reception on April 20 in the Grand Ballroom of the retired Queen Mary liner in Long Beach, California.

Hours before, Champ Car had staged its final race, the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. With it, the era of turbocharged open-wheel racing in the U.S. had officially ended. Now, open-wheel racing will be “unified" in one series, the Indy Racing League, clearly suggesting which of the two series had won the war.

The Grand Ballroom was where Champ Car’s most recent partners, mega-wealthy industrialists Kevin Kalkhoven and Gerry Forsythe, and a third, Trans-Am driving champion and owner Paul Gentilozzi, had staged their first celebratory event in February 2004 not long after they rescued the failing series, a reception prior to the winter meetings.

The “unification" is a politically correct misnomer. It ends the “split"—a commercial and fan quagmire—that began in 1996 when Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner (and Indy 500 operator) Tony George launched the rival Indy Racing League to control the Brickyard’s destiny. Only the IRL is left standing where collectively Champ Car (a.k.a. CART) and the IRL spent at least $250 million, if not double that, to subsidize teams, television, and promoters. The cost would have been zero if everyone had made nice 12 years prior when George created the IRL.

Champ Car was bankrupt, literally and figuratively. Were it not for one race, the lucrative Indy 500, George’s IRL might have been in the same boat. No matter how the two leagues tried, open-wheel racing in this country was and is as moribund as the permanently berthed Queen Mary (which, ironically, is another financial and cultural boondoggle).

It’s all in the numbers, and they don’t lie, be it attendance, costs, or TV viewership. At the Long Beach street race, roughly 32,500 seats were constructed for spectators, so how to reconcile media reports claiming three-day crowds of 200,000 for Champ Car’s premier event? Moreover, that’s a third fewer seats than in ’04, when 48,206 were erected.

Slipperiness with numbers is almost a birthright for racing bigwigs. Heck, the little-seen ALMS (American Le Mans Series) said with a straight face that 105,000 attended its race the day before the farewell Long Beach event. The grandstands that Saturday appeared collectively one-quarter full. More at Car & Driver