MVN - Most Valuable Network

Word to IRL’s George: DON’T SETTLE!

Two months into open-wheel unification, things are looking up for Tony George and his IndyCar Series.

Besides unification, headline-grabbing victories by Graham Rahal and Danica Patrick in the early stages of the season have helped to give the circuit a fair head of steam going into the 92nd Indianapolis 500. Also, the potential chaos that could’ve ensued while multiple new teams and drivers learned the art of oval racing has been less than expected.

George touched on this and other topics during a Pole Day press conference at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He gave credit to the newcomers and to the established IndyCar squads for helping them:

“We could have had a lot more accidents than we had. We have teams that haven’t done oval racing in a while or drivers who have never raced on ovals coming in an acclimating themselves to ovals and that style of racing. They’ve done a really good job.

“I’m proud that the help and support of the teams that were in the IndyCar Series and that whole esprit de corps. I’m proud to be part of that. It’s not just select teams doing that. It’s all of them showing that kind of cooperation.”

As one might expect, George was reluctant to talk about the newly solved open-wheel split and preferred talking about “looking forward.” All well and good, but when he was asked what IndyCar could do to regain its former glory, some of his comments seem to be a bit underwhelming:

“Just keep doing what we’re doing. We have great young stars we can develop. We’ve got a very diverse group of stars. We can race in a very diverse fashion on ovals or street and road circuits. We can race domestically. We can race internationally. We have to look for and try to capitalize on the best opportunities that are presented for the future…”

IndyCar has a chance for a bright future, but George and his team can’t just keep doing what they’re doing now. There’s still plenty of problems with the series and in an American racing landscape dominated by NASCAR, those problems become amplified.

The league officials must be open to new ideas (their moves toward alternative fuels is a good start) and show fans that they are truly taking advantage of this new opportunity afforded by unification.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 12:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.