I'm out of here (well not out of the forum).

[Hardrockracer]

What kind of a cheesy "merger" is this? The IRL sucked up CCWS and took a couple of CCWS’ races. American open wheels racing for me is tied to turbo engines and the sexy Reynard and Lola chassis since I started to follow the series in the mid ninetees. Those cars were different from the F1 cars and I liked that a lot. Also the diversity of racing with all its different venues. I am not going to be interested in watching those butt-ugly IRL “racecars” with their boat-anchor N/A engines. This is fenderless NASCAR with wings. Sorry guys.

It’s not that easy to fix American open wheel racing Mr. George. I don’t care too much who runs the series since the ChampCar executives also proved not to be the real McCoys in a lot of moves they did in the past. But unless there will be a concept that will include a racecar that deserves this term and the turbos I am out of here.

Some body wrote about a 22 to 24 car grid. Gimme a break. A unified series should have at least 28 to 30 cars.

Perhaps I will just dig out some old races I have on video and dream of the good old days.

Hastalavista

HRR

[Shirk]

No idea who came up with the "merger" moniker; it's not even a buyout – it's basically just the looting of a corpse that Tony George had a major hand in killing. The Champ Car Series that can be traced back almost a hundred years to AAA days will cease to exist. The aggressor has won the war he started, and justice will not be done, as history is written by the victors.

What remains is the question who's supposed to watch this conjecturally new series, which of course will be the same old IRL, with a few CCWS teams and tracks thrown in for "good" measure. Ironically, adding former CART teams and former CART tracks hasn't noticeably improved the on-track product in the past few years, so why should it work now? Just because there's no longer an alternative for fans of US Open Wheel Racing? Clearly, old-established Champ Car fans, the few that remain, who have so far despised the IRL for all the right reasons will continue to do so and find something better to do than watch this "re-unified" mongrel. Either way, there's no reason to believe that TV ratings or track attendance will significantly improve, so the sponsorship situation will remain grim.

But who knows, if George catches a few more lucky breaks over the next few years, completing his bold vision by finally making the IRL a NASCAR support and feeder series, maybe in a decade or so, however unlikely, open-wheel racing in the US (i.e. the IRL) will be back on the public's radar, cautiously beginning to approach the levels of popularity it had back in the 1990s before the guy who's now cherished for supposedly saving "Indy-style" racing picked the quarrel that brought it to the brink of oblivion in the first place.

I hope everyone is able to acknowledge the irony therein.

[jarrambide]

I´m closing this one, this opinion could have been easily expressed in the "Done Deal" or "Is this really a shame?" threads, that and the fact that I don´t believe in people opening threads to declare they are going away(specially if you only have 37 posts), people come and go in internet forums.