By Mike Knapp
Back in 2016, I was trying to get a job in racing, and I started working with a guy called John Cummiskey, who had his own team in the USF2000 series.
John is a great guy, and his career in racing was pretty amazing. He had always dreamed of working for Team Penske, and parlayed a job sweeping floors in the garage to a life spent working for one of the best teams in the world in the early-to-mid-1990s.
Of course, I wanted to know all of the stories. Winning races, traveling the world, attending the Penske/Ayrton Senna test, and even meeting people like Beatle George Harrison. (He had dinner with both, and said they were “nice guys”. It takes a lot to get John awestruck, and frankly, I’m not sure if it’s happened yet.)
On a couple of occasions, we talked about the 1995 Indianapolis 500…you know, the one where his team, the defending race winners, didn’t participate.
John’s explanation was simple: we weren’t fast enough, so we just loaded up the trucks and got ready for Milwaukee the next week.
That was then, and a year later, the IndyCar world was split at the seams when the fledgling Indy Racing League wanted to guarantee 25 spots in the 1996 Indy 500 to its participating teams.
Guess who vehemently opposed it at the time? That would be Roger Penske, who, along with several other team owners, took their ball and went home, then started their own racing series that, coupled with the rise of NASCAR at the same time, basically sunk American open wheel racing for a generation.
Fast forward almost 30 years, and The Captain has had a change of heart. As Nathan Brown writes in the Indy Star, the ideas they have been floating around to enhance team ownership and give them a bigger stake in the series includes a guaranteed entry into every race, including the 500.
Wait…what? Look, I get his stance, at least to a point. If teams are going to make the multi-million dollar investment of putting a car on the grid, they should have some sort of rights and privileges.
And, he does have the point that failure of a full-time team to make the race can have a significant affect on that team’s future. He’s correct, it’s not the 1990s anymore when grandstands were packed, people were watching on television, and sponsors where throwing around money like drunken sailors.
But doesn’t he realize that part of the reason that isn’t happening is because of the actions of people all those years ago?
So, just like NASCAR, here’s the question to ask: are we looking for full-on pure competition, or are we talking about entertainment that has a competitive element?
If we are talking about competition, then we are going the wrong direction, because in sports, nothing is supposed to be guaranteed.
Last year, the New York Mets had a team payroll of nearly $350 million, yet finished with a 75-87 record. This past winter, the Los Angeles Dodgers have spent over $1 billion on free agents, and on paper have put together one of the best lineups the sport has ever seen.
But when the season ends on September 29, if the Dodgers haven’t won enough games, they all head to Cancun for the winter.
That’s sports. That’s the way sports have to work. You have to earn your way.
The economics of the sport have changed, I’ll give you that, and so have the demands of the public as to what they want competition to look like. But lately IndyCar is starting to travel down a slippery slope between competition and entertainment, and I don’t like it.
This idea sucks, and it totally goes against what competition is all about.
What I’ve appreciated about IndyCar is that as the racing landscape has changed over the years, they did a pretty good job at sticking to their guns.
That’s starting to change. Think back to the Indy 500 last year. Let’s call it what it was: a NASCAR-style green/white/checker finish.
Did it give us an awesome, Game 7 thrilling finish? Of course it did, but at the same time, it totally negated the previous 497.5 miles of racing.
Is that what IndyCar really wants? Do they really want a bunch of manufactured bullshit that brings in fans and TV ratings while completely shitting on what it long stood for?
When a team enters a car for the Indy 500, they should only be guaranteed two things: a garage stall and an attempt to qualify.
That’s it, because that’s what competition is all about. It’s a Graham Rahal not making the race, or a little team like Juncos knocking out the mighty McLaren in the final seconds.
It’s about people putting themselves on the line, and the best person winning. Anything other than that isn’t competition, it’s something completely different.
You can’t call the Indy 500 the “Biggest Race in the World”, and then turn around and let people who didn’t earn it compete.
It’s the biggest, fastest, most prestigious race on the planet, and a win there makes a driver an immortal. You should have to earn that title every step of the way.
Your INDYCAR Experience 