The Oral History of The Split, the Event that Transformed American Motorsports

From Road & Track

An entire generation of racing fans has grown up knowing NASCAR as America's most popular form of motor racing. Buried deep in its shadow, you'll find IndyCar, the old-timey series that can't get its shit together-the unkempt Jeff Lebowski to NASCAR's blustery Donald Trump.

Prior to 1996, the roles were reversed. IndyCar was America's pride, our defining, motorized identity. NASCAR, a well-liked product of the south, was half IndyCar's age, held limited appeal for many, yet was gaining momentum on its open-wheel rival through deft marketing plans.

And then came "The Split."

Inside the world of IndyCar, The Split refers to the decision by Indianapolis Motor Speedway heir Tony George to break away from the beloved CART IndyCar Series.

George, a non-voting member of CART's governing board, felt the series turned its back on American drivers and had severed its roots with the dirt track ovals that launched IndyCar's biggest stars. Rising costs were also troublesome. Those concerns aside, George lobbied for years yet lacked the power to change CART's direction to fit his vision for the future. Displeased with the response from CART's team owner-led group, George unplugged IMS from CART and formed a new product for 1996, the Indy Racing League.

To fully grasp George's maneuver, imagine if the NFL's Super Bowl was held at the same stadium since 1911, that stadium had become the global symbol for football, and served as the place where the NFL's greatest attention and prosperity was found. And then that stadium decided the Super Bowl was no longer an NFL event. By taking IndyCar's Super Bowl off of CART's schedule, George wasn't simply sending a warning shot across their bow; he went nuclear as a first option.

Inside the world of NASCAR, The Split refers to the event where open-wheel racing made a near fatal decision that allowed stock car racing to take pole position in America's hearts. It was NASCAR's easiest victory in the sports/entertainment marketplace, and came as a result of the CART/IRL fratricide.

Not an anniversary to celebrate

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of open-wheel's bloody divorce. George's Indy Racing League, with the Indy 500 as its May 26 centerpiece, was countered by CART's US 500, which was held a few hundred miles north on the Michigan oval near its home office .

Warring factions, with 1000 miles of combined open-wheel racing on the same date using the same cars and the same rules, hell bent on extinguishing each other. What could go wrong?

First, the postscript

Jimmy Vasser, winner of CART's US 500, was dubbed "Jimmy Vass-hole" by bitter, quick-witted Indy 500 diehards. Indy 500 winner Buddy Lazier, a lesser-known but well-liked CART veteran, went from someone who failed to qualify for four of his last seven Indy 500s to the Indy Racing League's new darling.

Just as Vasser drew the ire of Indy 500 traditionalists for mocking the practice of drinking milk in Victory Lane, frustrated CART fans didn't need to conjure up a belittling nickname for Lazier; his presence in Victory Lane was considered a joke of its own.

Although Lazier won the race Vasser and every other US 500 participant wanted to capture, Vasser was happy to see a member of the CART family-one who spent most of his career in uncompetitive cars-make the most of the IRL opportunity.

"When Buddy won the race, I thought, 'Hey, at least it's Buddy, one of us. At least it wasn't one of those. . . other guys,'" he admitted.

The "Other Guys"

For every Lazier, or star-in-the-making like Tony Stewart at the 1996 Indy 500, there were two or three unknowns on the grid. Half the field could have been made-up characters from the Witness Relocation Program, and while there were some quality drivers in the other entries, few-if any-would have troubled CART's best at Michigan.

Seventeen of the 1996 Indy 500's 33 starters were rookies. It spoke to the raft of opportunities George's upstart series offered to many who would have been laughed out of the US 500 paddock. In some cases, the widespread openings at Indy led to signings that showed the folly in CART's elitist hiring practices. Stewart was a prime example of George's overlooked short oval talent who was irrelevant to CART's team owners yet was able to use the IRL as a springboard to stardom.

Stewart notwithstanding, the best drivers were in Michigan. The same couldn't be said for the "IRL 500." Living, breathing punchlines littered Indy's field of 33. "Bronco" Brad Murphey and Racin Gardner were among the names that sounded like bad fiction brought to life, but they were, indeed, actual drivers who filled Indy's talent void.

How much?

As a young mechanic and junior engineer in CART's training series who dreamt of being at Indy, all I can say is living through the period was dispiriting, but it occasionally produced a few laughs.

I'd met the first IRL CEO, a guy named Jack Long, late in 1995 while we were eating dinner at our hotel restaurant in Monterey. We were there for the CART season finale with our Indy Lights team-the warmup series that ran before the big show-and Long was prowling the paddock for potential IRL entrants.

A solid annual budget for an Indy Lights team at the time was $900,000 to $1.1 million, and with the IRL planning to hold an abbreviated debut season with some races held early in 1996 and more later in the year, budgeting for the odd split-championship calendar came with a few question marks. A quality CART budget of $8 million or more was a fantasy for most Lights teams, but what about the upstart IRL?

Our team, Genoa Racing, had raced in CART, and was a longterm member of CART's training series ladder, which made its potential conversion into a IRL program-at least in Long's estimation-a natural fit. That was, of course, until he pulled up a chair during dinner and opened with what he thought was a persuasive argument.

"I can get you a engine lease from Cosworth for a million dollars," Long said.

Our team manager Thomas Knapp, a man with zero tolerance for unnecessary conversation, fired back with "We spend that for a year of Indy Lights, why would we waste it on an engine in a series nobody wants?"

Barring Long, Knapp's jaded view was shared by everyone at our table and represented the opinion of most in the CART paddock. CART was forged by Andrettis, Unsers, Rahals, Foyts, Penskes, and most of the legends associated with the sport. Its popularity was soaring when Long was hunting for teams. But without the Indy 500, CART's survival was no longer guaranteed.

How did we arrive here?

Inspired by Dan Gurney's infamous "White Paper," which prompted team owners racing in the USAC-led IndyCar series to split and form CART in 1979, George's decision to part ways with CART and start the IRL wasn't a radical concept.

"I remember we didn't think that USAC was providing the proper guidance to the series," Roger Penske told RoadandTrack.com. "They had stock cars, they had sprinters, they had midgets, they had all these other disciplines. Quite honestly, at that point the group felt that we would be better off to start our own series because we weren't getting anywhere from the standpoint of USAC.

"And I don't remember specifically what Tony [George] was thinking at that point. Obviously, there had been a lot of discussion of trying to get together during, after the split. The other [CART] team owners had no interest at all in the IRL. They had their own, I guess you could say, sandbox to play in and they weren't interested in amalgamating."

"It was an ugly time in terms of the sport," adds Chip Ganassi, whose team won the inaugural US 500 and the most recent IndyCar championship. "People were confused, teams were confused, sponsors were confused. There was a lot of uncertainty. We, as a team, took full advantage of it by obviously winning the US 500."

Ganassi, Penske, and the rest of CART's owners knew The Split would cause more damage the longer it lasted. Sponsors wanted and needed the Indy 500, and in a cash-fueled sport like auto racing, George held the high ground. Behind the scenes, Andrew Craig, CART's new CEO, was working from the outset to make sure The Split never materialized.

"To be frank, my due diligence in taking the assignment at IndyCar was very poor," he said. "I certainly did not understand the extent of the rancor between the parties and the extent of the concerns Tony George had at the time towards the governance of IndyCar racing. It was within a matter of days of my arrival Tony announced that he was going to form the Indy Racing League."

What Craig found at CART's headquarters confirmed the series' public perception of wealth and strength differed from reality.

"The first thing I noticed entering the IndyCar office were the large holes in the carpet which made me wonder, one, how the company was organized and, two, how much money it had," he continued. "As I say, my due diligence was poor. But obviously very quickly I came to terms with the fact there was a serious split with the Speedway.

"I went to meet with Tony at a very early stage, obviously. I had some open and friendly discussions with him, but at the time Tony was very influenced by a group of people. Some of it was cynical and it was just family interests. And certainly there were others-I would put Tony in this category-who sincerely believed that IndyCar racing needed to be saved from [CART's] team owners."

As the grandson of beloved Indy 500 savior and savvy businessman Tony Hulman, George was expected to continue his grandfather's legacy and lead IMS into a bright and prosperous future. Those grand expectations were unfair then, and certainly seem ill-fitting with 20 years of hindsight.

Pressured to act-to make the Speedway's interests the top priority-George spent the early 1990s pushing CART's ownership base to meet him halfway on his concerns. Left hanging with a big business to run and a steady stream of disinterest--and disrespect--coming from the track's most popular tenants, George evicted CART and never looked back. The resentment from that decision continues to sour the memories of those embroiled in the war.

"Tony George is a friend now," Vasser said, noting how their relationship has changed since 1996. "At the time, everybody thought, why are you doing this? But when you get all the facts together, he was put in a tough position to operate and try to control the destiny of this place and his family's legacy. When we had heard in 1994 at Surfers Paradise, for instance, something like [the IRL] would happen, I never thought it was going to come down to that. I always believed that until it happened.

"And then things just started to deteriorate for the whole sport, really. It was at the time that NASCAR just started to become that 800-pound gorilla."

Like an accident investigation, tracing IndyCar's modern ills back to The Split reveals a number of lingering symptoms.

Ticket values plummeted for the "IRL 500." The event hailed as "The Greatest Spectacle in Racing" changed from a cultural happening to something diminished and unfamiliar for many fans. The lack of household names turned the weeks of practice and qualifying for Indy 1996 into a ghost town. That change alone broke from tradition where decades of busy grandstands made the entire month of May a must-see occurrence.

With the advent of the IRL, only race day featured healthy crowds. Even with the biggest stars and fastest cars at Michigan, and the missing allure at the Speedway, Indy was still Indy.

CART's "US 500" featured packed grandstands, but most of those seats were filled by the series' biggest sponsors and auto manufacturers who distributed free tickets. CART needed a response to the Indy 500 that would satisfy its teams and sponsors-and keep those teams from breaking ranks and heading south to compete at the Speedway, which made public perception, and those packed grandstands, a visual necessity.

Although George sent CART's organization packing, the IRL still had a need to place 33 cars on Indy's grid. Forming an alternative to CART wasn't impossible, but coming up with a full field when another series with a full field already existed was a challenge. Complicating matters, George needed a little bit of help from team owners who might be willing to cross the open-wheel no-fly zone, but the men who owned CART teams also owned the series.

It was an interesting Catch-22 for George to navigate while CART prepared for its first US 500.

"The first thing I have to say about that, and I think this is a really important point from my perspective, occasionally I have heard people suggest that our ambition was to set up a race that would be a long-term competitor to the Indy 500," Craig said. "That was never the intention. I mean, such a move would have been frankly naïve and pointless.

"Now, for all sorts of good reasons, some of them legal, I was not in a position, nor did I want to be in the position, to say to the CART teams, 'you must not go to the Indy 500.' But the teams themselves decided, individually decided, they did not want to go to the Indy 500 on the basis of setting rules that would exclude the majority of our teams taking part."

To prevent CART teams from cherry-picking the event, George implemented the "25/8 Rule." It guaranteed 25 of the 33 starting spots would go to IRL entrants, which sent shockwaves through the CART paddock. For those considering a one-off return to Indy, George's 25/8 was a powerful deterrent that widened the divide.

"At that time a couple of teams did indeed go to the Indy 500. A.J. Foyt, Derrick Walker, they went off, and they were free to go. It was entirely up to them. Knock yourselves out. All the other teams stayed. But what became very clear was that we could not leave that weekend open. They needed something to offer to their sponsors as an alternative. It was because of that we decided to run our own race, which became known as the US 500."

Foyt, who ran George in the Indy Lights series during the late 1980s, had strong ties to the family. Walker, a CART loyalist with a relatively new team, and veteran owner Rick Galles, entered cars in the Indy 500, but made sure they also had entries at the US 500, which involved a logistical and staffing nightmare to cover both bases.

Collapse

In terms of keeping up appearances, those same-day events on May 26 looked healthy from the outside but were riddled with cancer. Having grown accustomed to generating heaps of cash during Indy 500 practice and qualifying, IMS saw income dwindle as fans stayed away in droves. Once 1997 arrived and the CART/IRL relationship worsened, Indy's empty-house trend prior to the race was set in stone. Sadly, it still continues today.

The US 500 wasn't much better. An embarrassing crash on the pace laps of the anti-Indy 500 event could be taken as a sign for how the period after the split would impact open wheel racing. While all the stars were indeed at the US500, they were crashing in Michigan while the replacements were racing at Indy.

CART's owners and stakeholders spent wildly to promote their Indy 500-less series, and while the US 500 continued until 1999 at a much smaller venue, the large, showy attempts to battle George's giant IMS bank account was always going to end in tears.

Peace, health, and reconciliation was the best remedy for The Split, but the prideful and empowered George, pitted against CART's tycoons-all Type A personalities bound and determined to bury their ally-turned-adversary, became locked in a death spiral.

By the time CART's owners opened their eyes more than a decade later, George was floating overhead, parachuting to safety as the remnants of CART-then known as Champ Car-crashed and burned at the start of 2008.

Bolstered by the addition of new events at IMS with NASCAR and Formula 1, George's family-owned track (and family-formed open-wheel series) had no reason to reconcile with CART. One by one, and with too many CART sponsors threatening to quit unless they were brought back to Indy, the most prominent team owners-even Penske and Ganassi-had no choice but to cross party lines and join the IRL once the 2000s arrived.

Even with most of the prominent teams in the IRL, Champ Car produced some amazing racing with Paul Tracy, Sebastien Bourdais, and others who remained loyal to the series. Champ Car's quality racing, however, did not translate into big business. Broke and tired, the few remaining owners who kept the series alive waved the white flag and "merged" with George's rechristened "IndyCar Series" in 2008 where many remain today.

NASCAR, a silent witness to the open-wheel's mutually-assured destruction, has also seen its series experience a decline in recent years. That decline, by comparison to IndyCar, is a rounding error; NASCAR's races continue to generate far more interest than anything IndyCar has to offer.

The eternal villain?

George has been vilified since his actions set The Split in motion. 20 years later, is it worth recasting the man in a different light?

"As much as Tony George gets grief about the Split, through his commitment, [IndyCar] is safer and he has done more to help oval track racing, NASCAR or IndyCar, than anybody," said Bobby Rahal, the CART champion turned IndyCar team owner. "Today when you have an incident, obviously the risk is still there, but nowhere like it was in the 90s, or the 80s even more so. The safety of the series is better than it was."

George's main adversary during The Split bears no animosity for the man.

"I think Tony was very, very sincere in his thinking," Craig said. "I don't think he ever in any way set out to damage anything. I think quite the opposite. He set out to make things better. Now, we can all disagree as to whether or not what he was doing was a good idea. But the motivations I think were honorable and very, very genuine.

"There were a lot of people with a lot of scores to settle. So I don't think for one minute it would be appropriate to say that Tony George was the single creator of the situation. To emphasize again, I do think that Tony actually had the very best of intentions and the best of motives. We too were at fault here, I am sure, along the way. We also acted on the best intentions and the best motives, but the result was not entirely positive for anybody."

Post mortem

How do the remaining team owners look back on the Split and its lingering effects? And is IndyCar permanently broken as a result of 1996?

"You had two series, which is better than none, and they finally came together in 2008, but neither one was strong at that point," Rahal said. "Clearly, The Split was a disastrous thing. I look back at that era, the 90s in particular, and [CART] IndyCar racing was on a huge high. Nigel Mansell coming over, Toyota coming in, Ford, Honda. I mean, we had multiple tire manufacturers. When you look at that decade, the amount of commercial money that was in IndyCar racing, it was far in excess of what it is today. I hope we get back to that point. That will make for healthier teams. Quite a few teams were healthy in that decade and that is not the case today."

Penske believes a soft economy from 2008 onward and cultural changes have contributed more to IndyCar's woes than anything related to The Split.

"I don't know that there is any lingering effects," he said. "I think you go back 20 years, things have changed so much. The sport has changed. Technically, I think we've been through a financial crisis here in the United States. People have other options other than going to races to take their spare time opportunities. To me, right now I think the sport, from on-track performance, has been excellent. Lots of good racing. I think the costs have been brought way back in the days that we used to spend in the past versus what we spent today. That is one thing that the IRL did do, it took the cost down, which has been very beneficial."

Vasser has a less charitable view on the topic than Penske.

"I'm really at a loss for words to talk about positive things that came from The Split," he said. "I do know this, we are back together now and everybody I feel is trying to pull in the same direction. But [the problem is] not just IndyCar. I hate to be negative, but motorsports in general seems like it's not what it used to be. Formula 1 has less cars on their grid. NASCAR has cut a whole row out of there, from 43 to 40. It's an evolution. It is evolving in a different way. To think that we are going to get it exactly like it used to be. . . it's just a dream, really. Everything is evolving and it is going to be different forever."

Although there are lessons to be learned from The Split that can help improve IndyCar's future, Ganassi believes it's time to shatter open-wheel's rearview mirror.

"Look, I think in any business, in any sport, if you're looking at 20 years ago, I don't know if you can say it has any effect on what goes on today," he declared. "I think it's easy to point the finger and say this or that was because of The Split. If anything good came out of that it was just that we need to protect the sport and do what is right for the sport. The world is changing so fast. I'd just as soon put it behind us."

With the 100^th running of the Indy 500 on Sunday, we are still left with the legacy of The Split. It can't be erased from IndyCar's history, but it can be diminished. If we're lucky, as Ganassi rightly observed, this 20^th anniversary will bury The Split in the past where it belongs.