Comments (0) | |

Wednesday, Apr. 02, 2008

IRL poised to move to forefront

On the surface, Saturday night's IndyCar Series season opener probably meant very little to a majority of NASCAR fans. For those on the stock car racing side of things, the biggest item of the weekend was at Martinsville, where drivers who used to star in open-wheel cars, Juan Pablo Montoya and Sam Hornish Jr., were racing.

But the IRL, unified with Champ Car, now bears paying a lot of attention to, especially considering how smooth Saturday's race at Homestead went.

If there was ever a blueprint for how the first race in the reunion of the two series would fare, Saturday night's was it.

A few drivers - Marco Andretti, Tony Kanaan and Scott Dixon - dominated the race before Dixon won. More importantly, there were no abnormal accidents caused by inexperienced drivers on Homestead's oval, preventing what would have been an embarrassing season debut for the series.

Yes, it was a smooth start for unified open-wheel racing in the United States. It also could be bad news for NASCAR, but perhaps very good news for its fans.

NASCAR's rapid rise in popularity came during the middle of the 1990s. Coincidentally, that was also the same time that the open-wheel series split in half with Tony George taking his ball from the playground and going to play by himself and form the Indy Racing League.

Since then, open-wheel racing has been in a losing fight against NASCAR.

With the two open-wheel series split, they became less attractive for the casual fan. That played right into NASCAR's hands as the rivalries between Dale Earnhardt Sr., Terry Labonte, Jeff Gordon and Rusty Wallace got very heated. NASCAR moved forward while open-wheel racing slipped backwards.

The exclamation point was last year when two of the IRL's most popular drivers, Dario Franchitti and Sam Hornish Jr., headed to NASCAR.

Even when the IRL's races featured incredible three- and four-wide racing all the way to the checkered flag, NASCAR dominated the conversation.

That may not be true right now. The IndyCar Series has a lot of attention on it right now, meaning that it has a great chance to snatch some attention for itself.

A very strong open-wheel series should give fans of auto racing in this country another option when they are fed up with higher ticket prices, countless commercials during broadcasts or NASCAR drivers being too vanilla in public.

If enough fans pay more attention of open-wheel racing, NASCAR would be crazy not to react in a way to reach out to fans shying away from the sport.

Only a race into the season, the IRL has already made a serious impact. If this weekend's race at St. Petersburg is similar, then it could be well on its way to changing the image of auto racing in this country. Right now, it's just NASCAR with a little bit of open-wheel and drag racing mixed in, but that could be changing.