Doom, gloom and zoom, on-track and off

AP FILE PHOTO

Jenson Button might well look shocked: as a cost-cutting move, Honda announced earlier this month that it was leaving Formula One, putting the British driver and more than 700 others on the team out of work.

Norris McDonald

MOTORSPORT WRITER

The most significant news of the 2008 racing season broke right near the end of the year.

The world economic meltdown and its repercussions dwarfed accomplishments like Lewis Hamilton becoming the youngest world driving champion at age 23, Jimmie Johnson's three straight NASCAR Sprint Cup titles, and Scott Dixon winning both the Indianapolis 500 and the IRL championship.

Forgotten – almost – was FIA president Max Mosley's embarrassment at having his sex life splashed all over the Internet, the loss (for `09, at least) of the Grand Prix of Canada and Danica Patrick becoming the first woman to win an Indy car race.

And while it seems like such a long time ago now, it was only last February, in the dead of winter, that the Champ Car World Series folded and the Indy Racing League emerged the victor in the fight for control of open wheel racing in North America.

But the economy and the negative effects on racing eventually trumped everything else.

We should have seen it coming, you know, when the Honda F1 "B" team, Super Aguri, was forced out of business early in the year after Honda pulled its subsidy. But F1 teams have come and gone dozens of times in the past, so most people just shrugged their shoulders and carried on.

But it really turned out to be the first warning sign. By mid-December:

Honda had pulled out of Formula One completely. More manufacturers could follow.

Suzuki and Subaru had withdrawn from the World Rally Championship. Fingers are crossed that more won't follow.

Dale Earnhardt Inc. had merged with Chip Ganassi Racing in NASCAR and, at the time of writing, Petty Enterprises was negotiating a merger with Gillet-Evernham Racing.

Audi gave notice it would leave the American LeMans Series after the 12 Hours of Sebring next March. Less publicized, but every bit as important: Roger Penske withdrew his pair of Porsche RS Spyders from the ALMS P2 category and entered them in the (cheaper) Daytona Prototype class of the Grand American Rolex Sports Car Series.

Promoter Penske also announced the cancellation of the 2009 Detroit Grand Prix, an IRL-ALMS double-header.

Formula One announced severe cost-cutting plans for 2009. In-season testing is banned, aerodynamic development will be seriously curtailed, drivers will only get eight engines all season and teams that supply engines to smaller operations must reduce the charge by 50 per cent.

The Grand Prix of Canada went the way of the dodo bird because Bernie Ecclestone's financial squeeze play got to be too much. (He turned down $115 million over five years. How stupid of him to refuse it and how stupid of our governments for even offering it.) There will be no French Grand Prix this year because they can't afford it. The German Hockenheimring has demanded government money, or else. China has put F1 on notice it might not renew after 2010.

NASCAR, for its part, announced a ban on testing at all NASCAR-sanctioned speedways in `09 to save the teams money. But "independent contractors" like Penske still said that if Detroit's Big Three cut back on their manufacturer's involvement (in his case, it's Dodge), it will make things very difficult.

So doom and gloom dominated the motorsport headlines at the end of the year. But all was not woe and here, in no particular order, are some of the more positive developments of the last 12 months.

Canadian success stories: Scott Steckly of Milverton won the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series championship, Scott Maxwell of Toronto won the Grand Am Koni Challenge Series, Ron Fellows of Mississauga won the NASCAR Nationwide Series race at Le Circuit-Gilles Villeneuve in August, Gianmarco Raimondo of St. Catharines won the rookie championship in the BMW-Americas series and 17-year-old Chris Raabe of Napanee has been offered a five-race development deal in the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series by Peter Gibbons after tearing up the oval tracks (22 feature wins in 45 starts) in eastern Ontario and New York State. More about Raabe in the New Year.

Every one of the 10 Prototype 1 cars in the American Le Mans Series broke the track record in qualifying at Mosport in August. Drivers of the P1 cars might have lifted a bit at Corner Five but that was about it. The rest of the way around, they drove flat out.

Fastest was Italy's Dindo Capello, who sat on the pole in his Audi R10 diesel with a time of one minute 04.094 seconds (which translates into a speed of 223 km/h). Capello's time shattered the record he set a year earlier of 1:05.829 (216 km/h), also in the Audi R10.

After 30 years of trying, Team Penske finally won the Daytona 500 with Ryan Newman in the winner's circle and teammate Kurt Busch right behind him in second place. Team Penske drivers have won the Indy 500 14 times, but Daytona proved to be a little more challenging.

Later in the year, a Team Penske transporter en route to an IRL race at Infineon Raceway in California caught fire. The truck was destroyed, as were the two race cars inside. Backup cars were flown to California in time for the race, which was won by Penske driver Helio Castroneves with Penske driver Ryan Briscoe second. Yet another reason why The Captain is a legend in his own time.

Here's how the Indy car war ended last February: There were three partners who owned the Champ Car World Series, but only two of them counted and only one of those two really counted.

After years of blowing themselves apart financially, one of those partners (one of the two who counted) started talking to The Other Side. The partner who really counted (are you following this?) found out about this and was not amused.

So he, too, called The Other Side and in about 15 minutes the deal was done and Indy car racing in North America was really and truly unified. Moral: Coalitions don't work. Sooner or later they fall apart.

There was, however, "collateral damage" as a result of the above.

1) Paul Tracy, arguably the most exciting (but certainly the most loyal) of the CART/Champ Car drivers, was left out in the cold when his employer refused to race in the unified series. Tracy has since sued Gerald Forsythe for lost earnings.

A ride was arranged for Tracy at the Edmonton Indy, where he drove one of the finest races of his life, finishing fourth. But his career seems to be in neutral at the moment.

2) For the first July since 1986, there was no Molson Indy or Grand Prix race through the streets of Toronto. But the spectacle will return next summer, with Michael Andretti's organization doing the promoting and Honda Canada doing the sponsoring.

When Joe Gibbs Racing went with Toyota, the all-American boy Tony Stewart, who was clearly uncomfortable driving for a "furrin" carmaker, refused to sign a new contract. He has formed his own team in partnership with Cal Wells and will drive a made-in-the-U.S.A. Chevy in 2009.

When the year started, open wheel stars Patrick Carpentier, A.J. Allmendinger and Dario Franchitti all had rides in NASCAR. When the season ended, all three were out.

What does that tell you?

Norris McDonald writes about motorsport each week in Wheels. nmcdonald@thestar.ca

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