For years American open wheel fans have been awaiting what happened last week, and now that the series formerly known as CART, and the Indy Racing League are now "unified" again, some of racing's most powerful people can stop pointing fingers at eachother and find a way to get their sport back into racing's mainstream.

Let's get something straight off the bat. Excuses like "NASCAR has taken much of our fanbase," is totally untrue. OW lost its fanbase to nobody. People just quit watching. Those guys and gals are out there to be brought back into the fold, and the job ahead for Messers George, Kalkoven, etc. is big to say the least. The biggest problem may be who is going to be on the sidepods of these cars, and how do you generate interest from companies that no longer know you exist, or no longer CARE that you do?

At the forefront of this movement back to center is the Indianapolis 500. An event that has been eclipsed in popularity and importance by the Daytona 500. Tony George's leadership at Indy has made the Speedway more profitable than it ever has been with the addtion of events that did not exist before the OW split. Problem is that the Indy 500 is the center of the George family empire, and they want Indy in May to be what it was before the debacale. With the re-unification of American open-wheels, the door is open to get the race back to what it was, but there will be no harder thing to do than lancing the beast that is NASCAR, and the Daytona 500 in the American conciousness.

This partnership came just in time for ChampCar. A company that has seen more transition over the last handful of years than Britney Spears' personal life. The fact of the matter is that they were on life support, and only an olive branch from George could have saved them. The IRL still has value, ChampCar did not. The value of the IRL lay in the month of May, so we must reccognize that the Indy 500 is still a force in this industry. Too bad that was not reccognized in the mid-ninties before the split. We could have avoided all of this, and instead of wondering if Indy will ever be again what it was, we could be looking forward to the month of May.

Who knows, maybe we will again.