A brave new racing world beckons, we hope
It struck me recently that we really are coming to a turning point in automobile racing history and the surprise is it may be a more optimistic future than some of us have been predicting.
In the last year or so I’ve joined many people in the sport mourning the passing of the days of innovation and moaning about the arrival of the spec car age. I wrote about these things in the first few ‘The Way It Is’ columns and returned to the theme a number of times last year. Over the past winter almost everyone I know seemed to have begrudgingly accepted that the spec car age has arrived and they have to live with it.
Yet this spring both the
FIA and IRL announced their own separate initiatives to create new, technologically-interesting green formulas for
Formula 1 and Indy car racing in 2011. I’ve enjoyed exploring the early ideas from the FIA and IRL over the past month and will continue to discuss them over the summer. In this space on Thursday of this week, for example, top engine designer Mario Illien will provide his carefully considered views on the subject.
But the point is we’ve suddenly gone from looking back wistfully to looking forward optimistically, hoping the sport can make the right moves for 2011 and beyond. Wouldn’t it be great if these fresh buds of optimism were realized in four years with invigorating and exciting new formulas for
F1 and Indy car racing?
It won’t be easy to properly reinvent either formula of course, and to achieve the goals of creating competitive, entertaining racing which appeals to the masses, not just to engineers, manufacturers and the cognoscente. Formula 1 has achieved and maintained this critical balance for quite a few years. Contrastingly, CART and IRL failed in that quest, as did the original incarnation of IMSA, leaving us with today’s bifurcated and devalued forms of American open-wheel and sports car racing, and of course spec cars not only in NASCAR, but in Champ Car, IRL (effectively), the Grand-Am, etc.
