Goodbye Champ cars oh and sucks to be you Panoz

Jstas

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/02/08/champ-car-and-irl-working-on-truce-for-2008-season/

IRL and Champ Cars are one again. Well not quite yet but it's essentially a done deal. A bunch of races from the Champ car series get dropped and IRL goes from a paltry 16 car field to something like 40 something. Like CART used to be. Only problem is that it's still predominately oval tracks.

Oh and Panoz, yeah, sorry dudes and dudettes but you're open wheel racer is history. Tony George is "issuing" the Champ Car guys their own cars so you gotta stop developing and building yours. I mean after all, nobody can have a mechanical advantage over someone else. All the cars have to match so it's "about the driver winning the race, not the car". It makes "competition fair" dontcha know? In reality it doesn't though. It just means that different teams band together to create the mechanical advantage on the track by manipulating the aerodynamics of the car. Kinda like NASCAR, thee 200 MPH parade of billboards!

Yeah, sad day. Oh and with the death of the Champ Car, no longer do we get to see the race cars with so much downforce they can drive upside down.

1fastz28

i just hope they get more races and more road courses.

mule

I have a friend who is as driver. He did a season in nascar, he said it was very difficult. Basically the team that has enough money to rent a track out for testing has the advantage at that track. So if you are on a team with enough money to rent every track for testing you have a advantage at every track.

The other thing he said was very difficult was that you could do really well in qualifying and get the car set up the way you liked it but then when you went out in the race with that many cars on the track you suddenly couldn't pick the lines you want and the aero wasn't the same. He had a very hard time with the traffic and got out of his contract early and actually went to Panoz driving on their endurance team. The cars were very enreliable and I don't think they finished one 24 hour race.

He is with a Porsche team now doing pretty well.

cruzer

F'in A! The champ cars are so much better! I would love to see Danica spin one of those out.

Please, please, please add more road courses! Otherwise they are no better than the 200mph billboards that jstas was talking about (doesn't mean I don't watch em).

We all know that drag racing blows all of em out of the water.;)

F1nut

Ugh, it's sad day for open wheel racing in America. Tony George and the IRL are a joke.

Systems

Sooner or later one of them had to fold just too bad it had to be Champ bowing out.But with the big teams like Penske and Ganassi and the Indy 500 the IRL had the upper hand.Hopefully down the road a good series will result .Shame on Tony George for destroying the once superbly competitive and entertaining CART series.


Edit.I guess that means the 3 Canadian road/street course races are a no go.Is there a tentaive schedule?

ledhed

Well damn. First F1 becomes a joke and now this. Why doesn't anyone broadcast DTM, Aussie V8s or WRC over here?

Systems

ledhed wrote: »

Why doesn't anyone broadcast DTM, Aussie V8s ?

Agreed both are great series.Those V8's down under are insane to watch.

engtaz

I really stopped watching when IRL pulled out.

engtaz