Jan 25, 2010

George Walks Away From Indy

By JR Nerad

No one has had a more profound effect on motorsports in the United States over the past 20 years than Tony George. As the president and CEO of the Hulman family business, which has as its crown jewel the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, George triggered a tectonic shift in open-wheel racing that altered the motorsports landscape forever.

But the earthquake that George wrought didn’t have the desired effects -- at least in the eyes of his family -- and as a result he was forced out of his president/CEO post last year.

And now, he has resigned from his board of director responsibilities at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Hulman & Company, the business that stages the Indianapolis 500. George’s only involvement in the series he founded, the Indy Racing League, will be as a team owner.

That is especially ironic, since it was the team owners in control of Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) whom George decided to combat in 1994. Feeling that the CART cabal was elitist and not giving due consideration to the promoter of the series’ signature event -- the Indianapolis 500, which at the time was reigning unquestioned as the biggest single race in America, and arguably, the world -- George decided to start his own series, with Indy as the centerpiece.

His plan created a firestorm of controversy, and when the newly fledged IRL started to stage races in 1996, there was a lot of strong talk from CART owners that the league would never survive. But George was adamant that it would live on, and he levered the Indianapolis 500, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Hulman family fortune to prop up the league. Eventually, CART was supplanted by a carry-on organization named the Champ Car World Series, but the war between the two factions remained both bloody and costly. Even worse, the battle was a big factor in eroding fan interest in open-wheel racing in the United States just as NASCAR was really finding its chops as a national racing series.

In 2008, George finally won the battle, proving his contention that the Indy 500 was the big stick that stirred the open-wheel drink.

But his triumph couldn’t have occurred at a poorer time. On the heels of his “victory,” the economy went south. That plus the fan defections that had taken place over the previous dozen years left open-wheel racing a shell of its former self, and that’s when the Hulman family members, who had been looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, really grew cranky with George. So he was unceremoniously dumped from the top spot in the family business, and now he is out of that family business altogether.

It’s yet another cautionary tale about watching what you wish for.  Next Racing Rap>>