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When CART was on a roll... |
A dozen years ago the now-defunct CART/PPG Indy Car World Series was on a roll.
Jacques Villeneuve scored a great come-from-behind win in the 1995 Indy 500 after each of Scott Pruett and Scott Goodyear messed up in the race's closing stages and the 24-year old Villeneuve went on to win that year's CART championship, beating Al Unser Jr, Bobby Rahal and Michael Andretti to the title.
Villeneuve then moved to Formula 1 with Williams-Renault and was instantly competitive, finishing second in the 1996 world championship ahead of Michael Schumacher and winning the world title in '97.
A few years earlier of course, Nigel Mansell quit F1 and the Williams team to go Indy car racing with Newman/Haas. Mansell won the CART championship in his first year with Newman/Haas, then after a winless second year in CART made a brief return to F1 at the end of '94 with Williams and drove a few races for McLaren the following year.
In those days the CART series enjoyed a tremendous worldwide reputation and a fast-growing global TV audience.
The series provided a real alternative to Formula 1 boasting a broader range of tracks from superspeedways to street circuits and a more controlled but still interesting level of technology and competition among manufacturers.
The racing was closer, more exciting and much less predictable than F1 and fans around the world started tuning-in to this American-based but very international form of racing.
And let's not forget that in 1995 the Penske team famously failed to qualify for the Indy 500 after dominating the previous year's race. That's how deeply competitive CART was in those days.
For a few years, incredible to recall, CART began to threaten F1's dominance of motor racing's worldwide TV market and also provided a serious, money-making alternative to F1 for the world's best open-wheel drivers.
But of course, politics, power struggles and the CART/IRL civil war ruined all that, allowing F1 to carry on unperturbed and unchallenged as the world's only major form of open-wheel racing.
Today, Champ Car is trying to be what CART once was, but without any ovals and only six 2008 races in the United States - the smallest number in the ninety-nine year history of what was once the American national championship.
