Champ Car 2008 Schedule

The biggest CC fan on the forum. No Paul Tracy is not leaving. He is not going to the IRL. He is staying with Forsythe.

Robert Doornbos or Graham Rahal for the championship.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Hayden Fan @ Dec 20 2007, 10:48 PM) [snapback]104935[/snapback]<div class='quotemain'>
The biggest CC fan on the forum. No Paul Tracy is not leaving. He is not going to the IRL. He is staying with Forsythe.

Not from what I've read, although it could all just be speculation at this point.

I'm confused at whats happening to Champ Car now. It doesn't even look like a North American series anymore. They've completely abandoned ovals. Half of the races are outside the US! Very few recognisable names to your average American fan.

Future doesn't look good, unfortunately. They seem to be confused about what they actually want the series to be.

CC is ready. Right now it looks to have from 18 to 22 cars on the grid in Long Beach.

On another forum, Paul Tracy's mother came on and told us, Paul is dedicated to CC, and it was an e-mail from an unspecified person at his team that said if he didn't renigotiate he was out the door.

Ovals are not for CC anymore. CC wants to distance themselvs from the IRL, and oval racing does that. CC wants to have people think great road racing, they think CC. Not F1, not sports cars, CC. When people think of OW racing and ovals, they think the Indy 500, and that is what CC hates, as some old CC races on ovals have been called Indy Car races by the local press, which they are not.

CC will be around for many many more years. One thing with you being in Europe is that you do not hear many smaller stories. Like Conquest Racing expands and will most likely have 2 cars full time with full time drivers. Forsythe and Dan Petitt(co-owner at PKV) run the Forsythe crew, and are looking at 3-4 cars, with Justin Wilson and PT with rookies James Hinchcliffe and Frenchman Franck Perera. Minardi is returning Doornbos and is looking at GP2 standout Ernesto Viso for the second seat. Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing which lost Bourdais to F1, is still looking for a driver and have ruled out leaving the series.

New teams could include Rahal/Letterman from the IRL. They lost Scott Sharp and his money to the ALMS, and have only one driver with only 6 IRL starts. They might go to CC, taking with them Ethanol fuel and Ethanol as a sponsor.

Confused. They want CC to be the better, unpolitical F1. A cheaper F1 as well, running a spec series.

Names. True CC does not have names. Mostly because of Nascar and they stranglehold they have over all other motorsports in the US, including motorbike racing, OW racing, drag racing, even the Red Bull Air Race events in the US got little attention even though they put on the greatest spectacle in motorsports. With a second year with ESPN and ABC, they have a great TV package which will allow more people to watch and find how great CC is over all other 4 wheeled racing.

If a cheaper version of F1 is what they're trying to be, then that just makes what they're attempting even more perplexing. To me thats like starting a newer, less exotic version of the World Cup. In other words, it'll never work. 95% of upcoming drivers, maybe with the exception of the US due to NASCAR, will always make Formula One their career goal, because it's built up that reputation of having the fastest cars and the best drivers over a period of over 50 years. It's a reputation that could only be broken if F1 went bankrupt and ceased to exist, which is extremely unlikely given the sheer amount of money thrown about the place. An average viewing figure of half a billion per race is something that I can't see any other series ever getting close to, and if it does, Bernie Ecclestone will see to it that its crushed. MotoGP is the only series that comes close with 300 million per race, but MotoGP and F1 are essentially two sides of the same coin.

I understand what you're saying about them distancing themselves from the IRL, but I just can't see a bright future for CC at the moment. The sad truth is, without the 500, they're always going to struggle.