If Tony didnt want CART teams in the series than why he created a calendar that does not interfere with CART calendar?
One might think that would be more efficiant way. Because afterall three CART teams: Walker Racing, Galles Racing International and Dellapenna Racing Team all "sneaked in" but... people tend to forget
A few points.
IF CART had felt enough welcome as TG said they were and accepted the invitations to race the IRL events and make sure they would be in the preferred 25, what would that have caused?
First: the teams would have retained all their ’95 and ’94 hardware: none of this would have been available to the IRL teams as what eventually happened with a number of these cars. Which leaves the question what kind of hardware the IRL teams then would have used instead: even more of the still surviving pre- 1994 cars than what happened eventually?
And then these teams with that old stuff take on the CART teams with their more modern hardware and their experience with this hardware from the year before?
What would have been left from TG’s dream to give Indy back to the little guys? What whould have been needed to give these little teams a decent chance against the CART Teams and fulfill his promises? All that it would have resulted into was what the documentary ssuggests: Had CART given in then at least he would have them back at the Speedway but from then on with more control and way more on his terms than ever before. But then he had to postpone and work out another plan to break their power and help the little guys.
Fortunately for IRL, some CART teams still needed the money to be earned with selling off older cars. Had all the CART teams retained their ’95 Lola’s & ’95 Reynards (and the near identical ’94 Reynards) then only Menard, Foyt, Hemelgarn and Simon Racing would have had ’95 origin chassis, everyone else was obliged to use ’94 and/or older cars. There were a few ‘94’s in other hands already, Treadway’s ‘94 Reynard that eventually became the all time fastest car ever at Indy among them.
To see his plan to help the little guys get it all, TG couldn’t use CART to begin with. At least as long as the new atmo cars were not built yet, he needed CART to release their hardware he heeded for his preffered kind of teams. I can’t comprehend how the ’96 starting field would have looked like car-wise had those CART released ’95 and ’94 chassis not been available to IRL….
Had CART not bowed out on their own in 1996, he would have needed to do something else to bother them one way or another in order to give the little guys the chance he had promised them.
BTW: Dellapenna ran only three CART events in '96 using their IRL car. Does that qualify them enough for you to humiliate them to be ` a CART team` ????
Edit: I must add to this that I don't deny the fact that things and certain trends within CART were wrong and lead to unwanted situations. I certainly won't support the thoughts that CART was the way to go as it did. But back then I didn't believe a split and either of the directions taken was the way to go and History has proven this to be the case.
Edited by Henri Greuter, 29 January 2021 - 10:48.