A Clean sweep at todays INDY 500, Brazilian racers finished 1st, 2nd AND 3rd!!! And its Brazil's 3rd win in a row at the Indy 500. Interestingly this 3 sweep at today podium by Brazilian racers was not mentioned on American sports shows, they simply seem to ignore that the 3 top finishers were Brazilians. Brazil proves again that they have the worlds best Auto racers, past and present.
Michael Shumacker is a great driver indeed, but its mostly the machine. Has Ayrton Senna not died in 1994 Shumacker would not have won as many races and titles as he did, that is something nobody can argue.
I hate to rain on your parade, but Senna wasn't exactly peddling around in Minardis either. He was fortunately to be at McLaren when Mr. Dennis and friends were simply the Bomb. Even an over-the-hill Prost was able to go to toe-to-toe with Senna, too. If you want a guy who took a crap car and made it respectable, most serious race fans would go with Gilles Villeneuve as the best exemplar of that phenomenon. Say, how's your boy Christian Fittipaldi doing over in NASCAR these days? Anyway, this isn't to say that Senna wasn't a great driver or that Brasilians suck or anything, but just to point out that Brasil doesn't exactly have a corner on the market for good drivers.
I do believe that his drive the day after his mother and his near total break down after the race, which he won, heavily disputes that. And he was a superior driver before he got to Ferrari.
Chalk this up less to the vast American TV conspiracy against Brazilians, and more to the fact that no one here gives a toss about the Indy 500 anymore. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I can't think of another major US sporting event that has suffered a comparable freefall in interest in my lifetime (the last 25 years or so).
I think after the IRL took over the Indy 500 and forced CART to form their own league, and essentially out of the Indy 500, it was all downhill. I think Brazilians only come to CART/IRL as an alternate route to F1 (as opposed to going to Formula Renault/Ford/Nissan, etc. in Europe), kinda like Brazilian soccer players go to less than a proven path countries to play football just because it'll pay a lot more than they'd get in their homeland and it's also an alternative way to get recognition in bigger leagues.
And why do you think that happened? Because AMericans STOPPED winning!!! Its become a "foreign" sport so all the Americans started focusing on Nascar where they still dominate. Its that simple.
Actually, the low point for the Indy 500 occurred immediately after the CART/IRL split when the winners were: Buddy Lazier (USA) Arie Luyendyk (NL) Eddie Cheever (USA) If you're thinking "Who the hell are Buddy Lazier and Eddie Cheever?", you're not alone. Sure, Formula 1 fans will remember Cheever as a late 80s F1 also-ran, but he was unkown here. And the IRL in its early years was plagued by small fields of unknown teams and unknown drivers, not to mention unsafe cars that injured a lot of guys. People tuned into the Indy 500 and didn't see the familiar names of Unser, Andretti, Fittipaldi, Tracy, etc., etc. NASCAR has always been more popular than open-wheel oval racing and all forms of road racing even when Americans dominated all three in the US. And that is never going to change. One of the many reasons that NASCAR has become so utterly dominant in US racing is simply smart, unified, focused management and the fact that the open-whell series spent more time shooting themselves in the ass with petty ego-squabbling than on actually running their series. If I was a potential racing sponsor making a decision solely on business grounds, I must admit that I'd have gone with NASCAR too. NASCAR has clear cut paths of progression to the top and feeder series that everyone understands. They have kept their drivers around long enough to make them stars. They have usually been able to keep the manufacturers happy and thus develop decades-long rivalries. Their schedule has been relatively stable. Contrast that to all the self-inflicted disasters created by the poorly-trained circus monkeys who have been ruining IRL and CART as of late despite the fact that the on-track action, in CART at least, has been far superior to Formula 1. Now CART boss Chris Pool wants to turn CART into a street-race-only series and is abandoning the great tracks like Road America, Mid-Ohio, etc. and sticking his cars on overgrown go-kart tracks. I can only shake my head in wonderment at how open-wheel racing here has managed to survive this long with such nincompoops running the show.
CART series will be gone in a few years. Personally, I prefer a series with both street, tracks and ovals.
I haven't followed auto racing much in a couple years. CART is really almost bankrupt?? I assume IRL is still all ovals? Not even NASCAR is that bad. Sheesh!
i have not followed CART either. Basically, Penske deflected to IRL. Michael Andretti followed. Sooner or later, all the top CART teams will deflect to IRL.