By Larry Edsall
In my most recent post, I wrote about the heyday of professional road racing in the United States, back when the Can-Am and Trans-Am and even the F5000 series were as big a deal as NASCAR and even rivaled USAC-sanctioned Indy car races with the exception of the Indy 500, which at the time truly was the ?greatest spectacle in racing,? so important that almost nothing else happened during the entire month of May.
As I mentioned, the heyday-era road racing series -- Can-Am, Trans-Am and even Formula 5000 -- were such big deals that there actually were more people in the grandstands and on the hillsides than in the pits and paddock.
So what happened to cause the demise of road racing as a great American motorsport?
The most simple answer -- and albeit perhaps the most over-simplified answer -- can be given in, I suppose, in just two words: Chris Pook.
Born in Britain, Pook moved to the U.S. and in 1975 convinced the city of Long Beach, California, to allow him to stage an F5000 race on the city?s streets. A year later those cars were replaced by Formula One cars, yep, the real Grand Prix.
Nearly a decade later, when F1 sanctioning fees became even more outrageous, Pook offered his street circuit to Indy cars, specifically to the Championship Auto Racing Teams? branch of Indy car racing, which made its Long Beach debut in 1984.
Annually, a couple hundred thousand people showed up, some, no doubt, for the Indy car race, but perhaps just as many for a pro-celebrity race that put Hollywood types into race-prepped sedans. But perhaps even more were there for what was, basically, spring break for grown ups, or for as grown-up as people in Southern California might ever become. College kids went to Lake Havasu or Baja, post-college kids went to Long Beach.
Other cities saw the big crowd at Long Beach and wanted Indy car street races of their own.
Problem was, there are only a couple of weekends each year that work for adult spring break. Another problem was, racing between Jersey barriers on city streets isn?t really racing; it?s more of a fast parade interrupted too often to remove vehicles that collided with those barriers.
As I said, crediting Chris Pook for all of this is over-simplification. Maybe we should blame Indy?s Hulman family for allowing a situation in which the most prominent Indy car team owners revolted and broke away. Or maybe, as conspiracy theorists will tell you, it was actually the France family?s work to split the Speedway from its teams so NASCAR could race at the Brickyard and perhaps, someday, even buy the place for their International Speedway Corp.
Regardless of blame or credit, Indy cars racing on road and street circuits soon became the primary form of American road racing to the demise of the real road racers, the sports cars.
Contributing to the demise, though they would have argued just the opposite at the time, Just as there was a split within the Indy car community that led to the creation of CART, so, too, there was a split within sports car racing, with the new International Motor Sports Association challenging the old-guard SCCA -- and subsequently being challenged itself by the Daytona-backed Grand Am Road Racing.
Once again, Daytona and the France family enter the picture; maybe the conspiracy theorists are right after all?
Such splits never seem to improve the sport, they only open opportunities for some other form of racing to pull out into the passing lane and become more prominent. For example, instead of being the headliner at real road courses, what was left of the Trans-Am series became a support show for Indy car events on city streets.
And the split in sports car racing continues with Grand-Am and its support events on one side and the American Le Mans Series and its partners on the other. With the possible exception of the NFL-AFL split that led to the Super Bowl (and eventually to one united league), sports history clearly shows that unity wins, schism loses.
Sports car racing?s split helped open the way for Indy cars to move not only onto city streets but on traditional road courses as well; Indy car?s split opened the way for NASCAR to expand its schedule to paved oval tracks from coast to coast.
Oops, I need to put the gearbox into Reverse for just a second. Another thing that happened is that the original Can-Am series dissolved and eventually was resurrected as the new ?Can-Am,? actually sort of a merger of the Can-Am name with cars loosely based on those that had been running in F5000, though now with their wheels covered.
This new series did help accelerate the progress of several racing teams and drivers who were ripe to move up to Indy cars (think Carl Haas, Truesports, Bobby Rahal, Al Unser Jr., Danny Sullivan and others) as Indy car racing morphed from a series primarily on oval tracks to one more focused on road and street courses.
As it turned out, road racing wasn?t dead in the United States. But instead of real sports cars, it became dominated by Indy cars, which in turn became occupied not by young American drivers working their way up from dusty local ovals but by foreign-born drivers who grew up racing go-karts on paved courses.
And where did those young American racers go instead? Why, to Daytona and to stock car racing, of course.
So while many of those young American racers now are Chasing the Cup, Indy and sports car racers are left to chase their own tails.
Read more of Larry at www.izoom.com.
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