Honda to Provide IRL With Engines

The Indianapolis 500, the cornerstone of Tony George’s 7-year-old Indy Racing League, lured another major player to the IRL Thursday when Honda announced it would provide engines next year for the 500 and other IRL races.

That means that IRL teams will have engines from four manufacturers to choose from in 2003, General Motors and Nissan, which have been supplying Oldsmobile/Chevrolet and Infiniti power since IRL’s birth in 1995; Toyota, which announced its involvement last year and says it is well along in its development program, and now Honda, which had announced last fall that it would no longer supply engines to teams in CART, the open-wheel racing organization from which George bolted.

CART, which will change its engine specifications next season to more closely match the IRL’s, has a commitment from only one engine manufacturer, MG, although Toyota has not ruled out building engines for CART, as well as IRL. There has been no word from Ford, CART’s other current engine supplier.

In a significant departure from tradition, apparently prompted by the urgency of the move, Honda’s IRL engine will be a joint project with Ilmor Engineering, another longtime major player in open-wheel racing. Ilmor has built racing engines for Chevrolet and Mercedes-Benz, among other companies.

The IRL, which struggled for respectability in its first few seasons, appears now to have turned the corner on that. The 500, boycotted by CART teams from 1996 through ‘99, has been luring them back since 2000 and attendance for the race itself, if not for all of the accompanying track activities in May, has returned to pre-1996 levels. George announced Thursday, after first denying it, that next year the IRL would venture outside the U.S., racing at Twin Ring Motegi, an oval north of Tokyo where CART has raced for several seasons.