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Sunday, May 27  CART winning the war with IRL Reuters INDIANAPOLIS – To some, the war between CART and the IRL is still alive -- and the results of Sunday's Indy 500 suggest that CART is winning. CART (Championship Auto Racing Team) drivers took the top five positions and CART owners claimed the leading six, leaving the remainder to the IRL (Indy Racing League) with the exception of sixth-placed driver Tony Stewart, a former IRL champion who now drives on the NASCAR stock car circuit. The IRL was founded in 1996 by Tony George, president and CEO of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, to rival CART because of a number of issues including cost. The resulting schism has meant the two series sometimes race similar cars on conflicting weekends. In the first year there was a bitter war of words between the circuits, but last year owner Chip Ganassi crossed the line from CART and entered and won the Indy 500 with Colombian driver Juan Pablo Montoya, who has gone on to join the BMW-Williams Formula One team. Now Roger Penske, a co-founder of CART, has also returned to the race he once dominated, claiming a one-two finish that extended his record total of Indy 500 wins to 11. He also claimed victory for the older circuit. "I don't think we need to look at statistics here to say it was a CART win. A lot of the IRL drivers had problems," he said. But he added: "There were a number of IRL drivers who could drive our cars. The statistics don't make it a CART race or an IRL race." Third-place finisher Michael Andretti, a former critic of the IRL, also soft-pedalled the rivalry. "Luck was against them," he said of the IRL drivers. "We were all mixing it up together. We ended up on top but a lot of them had trouble." Penske called for a reunification. "We need to have one open-wheel racing series. That way we can take open-wheel racing where it needs to be because we need to take it up a bit."  Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
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