What if It Never Happened?
I write this at the risk of getting into a discussion I’d like to avoid. But with the recent and unexplained drop in reader comments in the comment section below, I would welcome any discussion at this point. It’s odd, traffic hasn’t really dropped off here but the comments have. Maybe I’m picking boring topics lately.
I was going through last week’s Racer.com’s Mailbag and saw a question that caught my eye. Actually, it was Marshall Pruett’s response that really got my attention.
“Steve from Chico, CA” wrote in asking if IndyCar fans should stop worrying about where the sport once was, and lamenting the what-ifs – like what if there were multiple engine manufacturers, or a new chassis every year like it was in the early 90s. The reader suggested that fans should accept the notion that these things will probably not happen anytime soon and we should just learn to enjoy today’s IndyCar for what it is.
Pruett took the question and ran with it, thinking that was probably a good idea. But he added that those of us old enough to remember what IndyCar was thirty years ago in 1995 (how is that possible?); still have trouble accepting where the sport is today. He expanded his very good answer into several paragraphs that I’m not going to regurgitate here – but I highly recommend that you go back and read it on this page.
But it rekindled a thought in my head that probably any IndyCar fan over the age of 40 has wondered several times. What if The Split had never happened?
Younger fans have a hard time remembering or even believing that in the early 90s, IndyCar and NASCAR were pretty much tied in TV ratings and in overall popularity. Depending on who you talk to, some will say that it was NASCAR who was taking a back seat to IndyCar.
Of course, we all know that the politics in American open-wheel racing caused a split in 1996 that changed the sport forever. Few teams crossed over from CART to the IRL or vice-versa. The die-hard fans were not force to choose, but most chose their allegiance anyway. Some were all in favor of the idea of American drivers in an all-oval series that included the Indianapolis 500. Others preferred to follow the “cars and stars” of CART – the drivers everyone knew on familiar tracks, but they would not be racing in the Indianapolis 500.
The casual fan was confused. In May, they tuned in to see the names they knew – Bobby Rahal, Michael Andretti and Al Unser, Jr.; only to find they had been replaced by names like Buzz Calkins, Racin Gardner and Jim Guthrie. Only the die-hards were aware of the political nonsense going on. The casual fan didn’t care. They just knew that when they tuned into their one IndyCar race each year, they no longer knew the names of anyone in it. Why were there two IndyCar races taking place on Memorial Day – one at Indianapolis and another one in Michigan? Again, they didn’t care and they had no interest in finding out. Those that did try to find out were baffled with all of the political rhetoric. It was too much to take in. NASCAR still had the their familiar drivers. Names like Dale Earnhart, Dale Jarrett and Mark Martin were still on the grid for every NASCAR race. There weren’t two stock races taking place on the same day. There were no strange politics to keep up with. It was much easier to follow NASCAR than try to keep up with two IndyCar series and an Indianapolis 500 filled with has-beens and nobodies.
That has been dissected over and over and I hope this doesn’t lead to a discussion of how Tony George was the devil and CART was arrogant. What I do wonder is if The Split had never happened, would IndyCar and NASCAR still be tied in ratings and popularity?
I really don’t know the answer to that, and I’m not sure anyone does.
NASCAR didn’t really take off until they simplified their TV contract in 2001. Prior to that, NASCAR fans had to switch from CBS, ABC, ESPN, ESPN 2, TBS and even The Nashville Network (TNN). For 2001, the NASCAR season was split between FOX/FX, who got the first half of the season, and NBC/TN who took on the second half.
FOX had received rave reviews for how the technical advances they had brought to their NFL coverage, which began in 1994. They did the same for NASCAR. NBC sort of played second-fiddle to FOX, when they picked up the second half of the season, but some fans were starting to get in football mode by then.
FOX had assembled a team of broadcasters that proved popular with fans – Mike Joy, Larry McReynolds and Darrell Waltrip seemd to gel immediately. Their pit reporters and the new concept of the “Hollywood Hotel” in the infield was a popular new concept. It gives me hope for what FOX will do for IndyCar this season, but I digress…
The IRL ended up winning the broadcast war, remaining on ABC/ESPN (mostly), while CART moved around to a variety of networks, ranging from CBS to SpikeTV. Had it not been for The Split, would CART have been bounced from ABC/ESPN? Probably not.
As morbid as it sounds, I think NASCAR’s biggest boost came in the very first broadcast for FOX. Dale Earnhardt was fatally injured on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. The news absolutely captivated the racing world for weeks, if not months. While fans were loyally tuning in to FOX each week to watch Kevin Harvick race in the re-numbered No. 29 car that had been driven by Earnhardt and win in just his third race in that car. Fans were also enthralled with watching the progress of Dale Earnhardt, Jr, who won an emotional victory at that season’s Pepsi 400, on the same track where his father had lost his life less than five months earlier.
CART had their own fatality just fifteen months earlier. Actually when Greg Moore was fatally injured at Fontana at the end of October 1999, it was CART’s second fatality in just six weeks. Gonzalo Rodriguez lost his life in a practice accident at Laguna Seca, driving for Marlboro Team Penske. Those two fatalities hit the IndyCar community hard. Unfortunately, the nation hardly took notice – unlike when Dale Earnhardt perished at Daytona fifteen months later.
In the meantime, CART was in the midst of expanding internationally, racing in Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom. While FOX were giving racing fans every reason to tune in each Sunday afternoon, CART was racing in other countries on unfamiliar tracks during inconvenient time slots. The racing was good in CART, but no one was staying up late or getting up early to watch. NASCAR had not-so-great racing, but intriguing storylines each Sunday afternoon (or Saturday night).
Would CART have tried expanding across the globe without The Split? I think so. Even staying at ESPN would have allowed them to have inconvenient broadcast times. Would CART have better ratings without The Split from international venues on ESPN instead of obscure cable channels? Yes, but they would not be as good as NASCAR on FOX. Nothing that CART or the IRL did had anything to do with Earnhardt’s passing. It would have happened anyway.
Looking back, I think that the death of Dale Earnhardt and the FOX TV deal helped catapult NASCAR into the mainstream. Previous non-racing fans were suddenly talking about that weekend’s NASCAR race at work on Monday. ESPN was showing more highlights on SportsCenter, than they did when they were showing NASCAR on their own network. Sports-talk radio was suddenly talking NASCAR right alongside their usual stick & ball topics. It was suddenly hip to be a NASCAR fan.
Meanwhile, CART and the IRL fell further into obscurity. Would that have happened without The Split? I think so, but maybe not to the extent that it did. Right or wrong, that is also the same time that the lesser-known foreign drivers were starting to dominate both open-wheel series. Even after Earnhardt’s death, US fans related more to Rusty Wallace, Jeff Gordon and Jeff Burton than they did Gil de Ferran, Mauricio Gugelmin and Eliseo Salazar.
CART and the IRL both made some fatal self-inflicted wounds, trying to stay ahead of the other. Had The Split never occurred and it was CART trying to stop the momentum of NASCAR in 2001, could they have? I’m not so sure.
This is all water under the bridge now. What’s done is done. But us old-timers can’t help but wonder if CART could have kept up with NASCAR in the early 2000s and even passed them; when the fickle casual fans left NASCAR just a few years after jumping on the NASCAR bandwagon. Would it have ever become hip to be an IndyCar fan? Unfortunately, we’ll never know.
George Phillips
Oilpressure 
January 29, 2025 at 6:24 am
Struggling now to think that I am considered an old timer. This question of the split has been raised at nauseam but that does not make it any less relevant. Just read MP’s comment and its difficult not to agree. He speaks for many of us fans, and we appreciate how he channels Robin Miller. Any long time IndyCar fan would agree with how incredibly stupid the split was and its resulting effects. If the owners of both sides had the benefit of a crystal ball and how collective decisions would derail the sport would they have reconsidered? Greed is profoundly evil and the powers that were at the time received the consequences. It is truly “asinine” . Its maddening but there is nothing we old timers can do about it. Seeing what NASCAR has turned into one can only assume IndyCar would have continued its trajectory but like you said George, we will never know. Now, off to the IndyCar news of the day.
January 29, 2025 at 6:38 am
I really think that the major cause in the loss of interest in motor sports in general had nothing to do with the Split. I think it had much more to do with the rise in popularity of the cellphone.
Prior to the late 1990’s / early 2000’s, very few youth had cellphones. After about 2003 they all had them. This has caused a fundamental shift in many industries, such as music. Really, the entire entertainment industry (of which motorsports in general are a small fraction) changed drastically.
January 29, 2025 at 8:17 am
I think that the impact of the Split–at least, the one that occurred in 1996–on IndyCar’s popularity relative to NASCAR has been significantly exaggerated. It was the continuation of a trend that had been underway for 20 years at that point. When I was a kid in Indianapolis in the early 70s, NASCAR was a regional sport, and the only time I would see it was on Wide World of Sports, when they weren’t showing barrel jumping, cliff diving, or figure 8 racing at Islip. Two decades later, I was seeing Jeff Gordon on boxes of Mini-Wheats. The Split accelerated the divergence, but it was already well underway.
On another note, in your last post, you recommended coming to IMS for the full week of practice before Pole Day. I am going to do that! I’ll be in St. Louis on May 12 as my son graduates from college, so I’ll just point my rental car eastward and spend the rest of the week in Indy. Perhaps we can get together for a longer period than when I saw you at the 500 last year.
January 29, 2025 at 8:52 am
I was a casual fan when the split happened. It was very confusing and frustrating. Thankfully, my favorite driver remained with the IRL. I watched for AJ Foyt. Around the reunification was when I was becoming a serious fan of the series and not just the Indy 500.
January 29, 2025 at 8:54 am
I agree with Big Mac on this. While the split had an immediate and detrimental impact on Indycar’s popularity and certainly benefitted NASCAR, NASCAR was very much ascending prior to the split and prior to the acceleration that occurred after the FOX TV contract and Dale Earnhardt’s passing.
From 1990 to 1995, the Daytona 500 had closed its ratings gap to the Indy 500 down to half of a ratings point on average, and had actually beaten Indy in the ratings in 1989 and 1994. But beyond that in the immediate pre-split years, NASCAR was having tracks built and planned (and, in some cases, acquired) for it at a rate Indycar wasn’t. NASCAR was growing its schedule and roster of sponsors at a rate that Indycar wasn’t. NASCAR was, by all appearances, selling more merchandise than Indycar was in the early 90s.
Ultimately, I think, NASCAR had and still has an inherent advantage over Indycar in that it is “stock car” racing, which has an appeal that is easier to translate to manufacturers and fans. It also has a staggeringly large base of participants and fans at the grassroots level that Indycar no longer has (if they ever did). In 1995, the following stock car racing series were contested in the United States at a national or regional level:
NASCAR Winston Cup
NASCAR Busch Grand National
NASCAR SuperTruck (new this season)
ARCA Bondo/Mar-Hyde Series
NASCAR Goody’s Dash Series
NASCAR Busch North
NASCAR Winston West
ASA National Tour
NASCAR Slim Jim All-Pro Series
NASCAR Featherlite Southwest Tour
NASCAR REB-CO Northwest Tour
NASCAR Featherlite Modified Tour
And, of course, beyond these series there were countless local track championships for all sorts of classes of late-model stock cars.
January 29, 2025 at 9:03 am
I wonder if it is a matter of cost for fans to be in the seat at a track or a sign of technology (aka the time bandits of cell phones & computers) changing the interest of next generation of would be motorsports followers?
Costs from a team’s perspective to participate in an event and to be forced to seek needed financial support as one of the criteria to partivcipate in an event or race series.
Granted financial resources have for the most have been needed when the first set of wheels turned in a challenge but semingly not as necessary as now and for the foreseeable future.
Not to overlook the cost to the spectator who wishes to attend motorsports events in person – lodging, food, tickets, etc.
Tickets… Please read Marshall’s posting today on Racer.com…..
“MARSHALL PRUETT: Oof. Penske Entertainment was taken to task last year by its teams after big year-to-year price hikes were passed down – like annual credentials for extra crew members, which went from $500 to $1000 for no apparent reason. I heard from several teams who reported their Indy 500 hospitality suites were subject to an extra $50,000 fee, with no extra amenities: just a giant money grab, from within its cash-strapped paddock.
I share this in response to the apparent cash grab here which, as I’ve read about in other sports, has become a common way to squeeze more money from fans through personal seat licenses and transfer fees. Probably not as big of an outrage for younger sports fans who are accustomed to such things — not as if they like it, but some newer fans have never lived in a time where PSLs didn’t exist — but for older fans who’ve been loyal to IMS, or your favorite local stick-and-ball team you’ve supported forever, it likely lands in a different, greed-based manner.”
Just another factor to discourage a team from participating and wonder if the “higher ups” are looking to promote the sport or just squeeze more $ out of the teams & spectators………………….
January 29, 2025 at 9:26 am
Ok… I’ll bite. It’s easy to point the finger at Tony George solely for the downfall of American open-wheel racing because he brought about the cataclysmic change when CART was at its peak. There is no way around that fact no matter which side you chose. However, to look at that event as the change in history that disrupted what would have otherwise been an unmitigated course toward CART world dominance is simply not realistic. (And before you counter… NO, Mansell didn’t come to CART because he wanted to. It was a contractual pissing match. And Senna was never going to come to CART. End of story.) Remember, CART budgets had gotten wildly out of control, and most of those budgets were being covered either by the manufacturers or Big Tobacco, or both. With the upcoming change to advertising laws brought about by The Master Settlement Agreement, those funds would have massively dried up soon as they eventually did with Marlboro, Players, Hollywood, KOOL, and probably others I’ve forgotten. Would other sponsors have stepped up to fill that void? Perhaps so. But it wasn’t going to be K-Mart (which had already scaled back), and many of the automotive companies (Valvoline and Pennzoil coming to mind) reined in their spending as well. (How much Castrol actually spend to put their logo on the Toyota and AAR experiments is debatable.) It’s not too hard to imagine seeing that void filled by large dot-coms through the late ’90 that went belly-up when that bubble burst which would have been just as catastrophic for CART.
Beyond that, I think it’s inaccurate to say that the public was “confused.” I think they knew exactly what they were getting, and for a while, there were plenty of fans to support both series. And many fans did support both series. It wasn’t until probably 1998-ish when attendance started to really drop for both series. It my mind – and this is solely my opinion – much of the drop was not due to fans be “confused” but simply tired of the rhetoric and the vitriol coming from the participants and the media. It seems in my memory most of that came from the CART side, but I may be well mistaken in that and I’m certainly not saying the IRL media was completely innocent. However, I just don’t remember a lot of the IRL media spending much time talking about CART, to be quite honest. They were busy doing their own thing (after the joke at Michigan in 1996 anyway). If CART and their media cronies had simply focused on their own job, could both series have co-existed without cannibalizing each other? Obviously, we’ll never know. But other series have been able to somewhat peacefully coexist without their market completely falling apart.
And finally, billytheskink absolutely hit the nail on the head – American open-wheel racing has completely turned its back on the grass roots fans and broken that trust. That problem goes back decades and was always eventually going to come to the fore. When I go to Fairbury or Macon or Terre Haute or Eldora, there is almost always someone there that I can watch on Sunday… whether in a car slinging dirt on track or signing autographs under the stands. ALWAYS. And that is never an IndyCar driver. I suppose you could go back to the early ’70s when USAC outlawed the rear-engine sprint car and removed the dirt ovals from the National Championship, but it is a real thing. People who local racing have zero connection with IndyCar racing anymore. That isn’t an “American driver” thing… that’s just a “make connection where the fans are” thing. When fans make a connection with a driver, they are invested in them, in their career path, and their trajectory. They will follow them through the ranks. We see it all the time in NASCAR (hello, Kyle Larson!!), let even the best of the Americans coming through the Road to Indy Ladder (Kirkwood, Herta, go back further to Hildebrand) go unnoticed at the grocery store because fans – and thus the fan’s media – have no vested interest in them. Improving the standing of IndyCar racing has very, very little to do with improving the racing. It’s about making fans care about the participants.
January 30, 2025 at 8:57 am
I think there was some confusion among the public, but not really among anyone in the public who was or could likely become a big racing fan.
That said, my all-time favorite piece of an overheard conversation was at a 1999 IRL race at Texas where a fellow looking across the track at the cars sitting in the pits told his friend “you can’t tell the Lolas from the Buicks”. I suppose that, technically, he wasn’t wrong…
January 29, 2025 at 9:58 am
In addition to what many have said here, I think at least some of the downward slide in Indycar has to do with variety. NASCAR seems to always have at least three car/engine suppliers, while Indycar has only had one or two in recent decades… We used to have a wide variety of both engines and chassis in the mix.
Since the late ’90s, Indycar has slimmed down to basically one chassis and two engines… exactly the opposite of what it once was. Lola, Mercedes, Toyota, Buick, Lotus, and many others have gone by the wayside as racing “costs” have increased to a point where it’s just unaffordable for any of the smaller companies to be involved.
I used to love when something new or innovative showed up at the track and blew the doors off of the competition (i.e., STP Turbine), or sometimes failed miserably (again the STP Turbine). But it was all part of racing back then, something the younger generations will never see.
January 29, 2025 at 2:20 pm
The split is irrelevant today, like you said George, “what’s done is done.” And rather than compare to Nascar, I’m more curious as to why F1 is flush with money and popularity while the domestic series always seems to be broke. Is it all because of one Covid-era documentary? Anyway, to me the split is just ancient history.
January 29, 2025 at 3:02 pm
Had the split never happened, I would still be together with my ex-girlfriend. I’m not so sure that would be a good idea.
But that’s a different split. You are writing about The Split.
As we are in the 2020s, we can talk about hindsight. With hindsight, maybe Tony George would have invested in ownership of other oval racetracks outside of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, as a way to get more oval racing onto the CART schedule, instead of investing into IMS’s own racing series. I’m not counting the “Mickyard” in this, since that was not a permanent racetrack due to not having any permanent stands for spectators. After all, Penske had his own subsidiary company for racetracks back in the day, the one that owned Michigan and Fontana, among others.
Without The Split and the all-oval series, we might not have seen the development of the SAFER barrier, at least maybe not until much later. I think that development is worth the price of admission a/k/a The Split.
Without the split, Sam Hornish and Tony Stewart would have had a successful racing careers, too, winning titles. But AJ Allmendinger might have a US open wheel championship as well. McLaren might have bought Forsythe Racing instead of Sam Schmidt’s team.
There might still be a Triple Crown. They might not have raced abroad so much in the earls 00s but at that other tracks owned by IMS all over the country instead. I can imagine Chicagoland being among them. Apart from that, it’s anybody’s guess where those tracks might have been. George Barber’s Motorsports Park and the Thermal Club might have never attracted the CART of today.
However, the 2001 CART race at Texas Motor Speedway would have been equally expensive as an event to be interrupted and eventually cancelled. The track would never have been a staple on the calendar. The cookie cutter layout would be different, probably shorter than 1,5 miles. NASCAR would complain that they sprayed some kind of goo onto the surface of New Hampshire Motor Speedway so that CART cars would race better but Stock Cars cannot.
The aforementioned Buzz Calkins and Jim Guthrie would have won in Lights instead. And Greg Ray, too.
Marco Andretti might have won his maiden Indianapolis 500 with Sam Hornish driving that day for a different team. Ed Carpenter’s driving career would have been shorter, and he would have gone into racetrack management sooner, at some place other than Indianapolis. He would have opened a driving school there, too. Sarah Fisher would have driven for Dale Coyne. But Paul Tracy would have been bumped one day regardless, maybe a few years later.
It’s the “what ifs” from the realm of fan fiction that make this scenario interesting. Ryan Hunter-Reay would have become champion sooner.
NASCAR? What’s a CoT? The banking at Las Vegas would be flatter, and the track would provide good racing for CART every year.
January 29, 2025 at 4:01 pm
quote from the book True Grit:
I do not entertain hypotheticals.
The world itself is vexing enough.
January 30, 2025 at 6:22 am
I’m British living in London so my point of view is probably different.
I first became aware of CART care of Mario and this introduced me to ovals. Then Mansell and the two amazing CART races we were lucky to have at our own oval track, Rockingham in 2001 & 2002. The split saw me side with ChampCar. I preferred the chassis rather than the IRL one. The grid also had Justin Wilson, Newman Haas, Bourdais plus others who I rated. ChampCar seduced me further by having a race at Zolder and another at Assen. Small grids but exciting racing. Then 2008 and I was at long beach when Danica won in Japan and Helio and others flew over. Yes I was pleased as open wheel racing in the USA was going to die otherwise. Very disappointed to say goodbye to the Panoz DP01 & i never considered tin tops as I’m an open wheel guy.
I enjoy Indycar immensely today. I am actually concerned that having a new audience will bring problems but realise the series needs the eyeballs to survive. I don’t like the fact that this is being hopefully achieved by the owner subcontracting this responsibility to FOX although many would say that’s clever business.
The 2025 season can’t start quickly enough for me and my new years resolution is not to criticise the series owners how ever much I am inside !
February 14, 2025 at 6:14 pm
You just made me throw up a little thinking back to when Fox started covering Nascar. The thought of Ole DW, Larry Mac, Jeff Hammond, Hollywood Hotel, Digger, etc. makes me cringe. To me, Nascar had already jumped the shark by then and it’s even worse today. How Nascar is more popular than Indycar has always been a mystery to me.
February 14, 2025 at 6:15 pm
You just made me throw up a little thinking back to when Fox started covering Nascar. The thought of Ole DW, Larry Mac, Jeff Hammond, Hollywood Hotel, Digger, etc. makes me cringe. To me, Nascar had already jumped the shark by then and it’s even worse today. How Nascar is more popular than Indycar has always been a mystery to me.