IndyCar series looks ahead to 2011 season

Associated Press

HOMESTEAD, Fla.

The champagne celebrating Dario Franchitti’s third IndyCar Series title was still bubbling Saturday night when team haulers began chugging out of Miami Homestead Speedway and into the humid South Florida night.

Even as the 37-year-old Scotsman told reporters he wanted to enjoy the moment, it was already passing.

The sooner the series gets to the future, the better.

Franchitti’s somewhat anticlimactic victory — he overtook budding Team Penske star Will Power when the Australian limped to a 25th-place in the season finale while Franchitti settled for eighth to win the title by five points — served as a perfect symbol for a series in transition.

Even as the cars whizzed by at 210 mph, it was hard not to think about what lays ahead.

There’s a new boss in CEO Randy Bernard. A revamped schedule in 2011 that includes a road race in Baltimore and a likely season-ending visit to Las Vegas. And officials are hoping a redesigned car set to debut in less than 18 months will further stoke interest in a series still struggling to get out of NASCAR’s considerable shadow.

And there’s a name change. The IRL is so 2009. IndyCar is here to stay.

There’s a lot to get excited about. There were 27 cars in the field Saturday, nine of them finished on the lead lap. Series title sponsor Izod has taken an aggressive tack in trying to engage younger fans while the series tries to lure back the estimated 15 million to 20 million fans that abandoned it during a painful split in the mid-90s.

“I think it’s certainly on the upswing,” said owner Chip Ganassi, whose team has won three straight championships. “You look at the car count, it’s on the upswing. It wasn’t that long ago we had 17 or 18 cars, so that’s certainly on the uptick. When you have the championship coming down to the last race for the fifth year in a row, it says a lot.”

Even if always seems to come down to the same two teams.

Ganassi tries not to roll his eyes when discussing the dominance of Target Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske. The teams won all but two of the 17 races on the schedule.

He believes the series is more competitive than it’s been and he’s not going to apologize for winning. It’s not his job to have his team slow down and give the rest of the field a chance. It’s their job to catch up.

“This isn’t seventh-grade girls tennis where everybody gets a trophy,” Ganassi said. “This is IndyCar racing, this is the top of the sport. Everybody doesn’t get a trophy here. While everybody can have the same rule book, there’s a difference here between the good drivers and bad drivers, good teams and bad teams.”

Bernard hopes the gap between the good and bad teams will start to close when the new car is unveiled in two years. He’s optimistic other manufacturers will join the series and give teams another chassis-option besides Honda.

The goal to bring other car companies into the fray is twofold: to push Honda for series supremacy while possibly driving down costs.