The Way It Is: The booming Atlantic formula.

Tuesday, 9th May 2006

Here we are in the merry month of May, hand-wringing time for ten unfortunate years about the state of the Indy 500 and American open-wheel racing.

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And he’s right, for sure. Reunification or not, the driving force behind the sport - any sport - is that talented, ambitious young athletes want to compete and the revived Atlantic series is proof that there are plenty of young drivers and teams who want to race open-wheel cars on road courses and street circuits. For generations, kids have grown up racing go-karts thinking of themselves by definition as open-wheel road racers, and the desire continues despite NASCAR’s looming presence in our lives. The new Atlantic series is a very encouraging sign that despite the political troubles of recent years there are plenty of talented, motivated young people angling for careers in open-wheel racing.

It’s interesting in fact, that as much as we berate our own ladder system, it looks good to drivers from elsewhere. I referred to the discombobulated European ladder system last week where Formula 3000/Formula Two, Formula Three, and FF1600 have been replaced or reduced by a plethora of manufacturer-backed spec-car formulae resulting in so many categories and championships that nobody knows who’s who or what’s what. Yet here in this country the same manufacturer-driven world seems to have been a boon. Thanks to the long-established Skip Barber system, allied to the recently-arrived Formula Dodge series, Star Mazda series and Formula BMW USA series, the American system looks healthier than it’s European cousin!

Another point is that one of the big motivators over the past twenty years for many drivers going Champ car racing has been the increasingly exclusionary nature of Formula One. Fewer seats are available in modern F1 compared to days past and some of those drives are a waste of time for any serious young driver. There’s also the infernally obtuse politics and power-broking of F1 which keeps a superb driver like Sebastien Bourdais out of F1 and spurns excellent drivers like Cristiano da Matta and Justin Wilson. Champ Car is the beneficiary of F1’s sometimes bizarre culture because it remains the only real option to F1, if not quite the same as in CART’s heyday.