Healing a 12-year split

The news of the day is that open-wheel auto racing finally found its way. Turns out, despite all those left turns, it had gotten lost.

To those who prefer noise and speed to stick and ball, this is a huge deal, a happy day. Open-wheel racing is one big gushing gearbox again.

Hope springs eternal. Many race fans thought it would take that long.

A dozen years ago, people who raced cars that didn’t look anything like the ones we drove -- cars that were sleeker and faster and had a magic untouchable element to those of us who got goose-bumpy over a ’56 Thunderbird -- had a falling out.

To simplify slightly, the problem was this:

One group wanted to do its racing on both oval tracks and road courses. The other faction, the one that owned the Indianapolis 500, wanted 95% of the races on ovals and saw all those twisty road courses as slightly un-American, all too neat-and-tidy European Formula One and not enough good ‘ol USA spit in your face to go wheel-to-wheel down the home stretch.

So they got a divorce.

In the settlement, the road-course faction (which was then and remained CART -- Championship Auto Racing Teams) got most of the best drivers with the biggest names. The oval faction retained the real estate, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Turns out, much as in life, real estate was the best investment.

Friday, they walked down the aisle together and slipped on rings again.

Tony George, who had the real estate and thereby the leverage, facilitated things by use of that ever-present healer of hard feelings: money. Champ Car, which CART had become when it declared bankruptcy a few years ago, will receive an infusion of cash from George for its teams and drivers to make them competitive.

There will be some scrambling for the rest of this year as race contracts for 2008 for both IRL (George’s Indy Racing League) and Champ Car are sorted out. But by 2009, there should be a unified schedule and effort to get open-wheel racing back to where it was, before 1996, before egos and greed intervened.

Sounds easy, but can the past be recaptured? Can the new, unified IRL return to the days of 100,000 people attending Indy time trials and the Indy 500 truly becoming, as it once was, the Greatest Spectacle in Racing?

More crucial, can the new IRL squeeze out from underneath the left front tire of NASCAR, which has pinned it there for more than a decade with superior marketing, branding and product?

Somewhere along the line, while open-wheel racing fiddled, NASCAR learned. Now, it is as much a cult-following as a sport. Fox and ESPN, in particular, have drunk the Kool-Aid and not only lived, but flourished.

So, there is much to be done in the new world of IRL. Two of the bigger names to race and own cars at Indy, 1960s stars Parnelli Jones and Dan Gurney, saw Friday’s announcement more as the beginning of a process than a solution.

“Certainly, this is what we’ve been hoping for,” Jones said. “It’s the right step, the right direction, but it has been a long time coming.

“When the split happened, I wasn’t happy. Racing never worked in a democratic way. We were all working for ourselves, looking for an edge over the other guy. We needed somebody to make us work together. Like NASCAR did.”

Gurney, once a top player in CART, was similarly hopeful, but also realistic. “I wish them all the best,” he said. “But what has it been, a decade and a half?

“What is it that the comedian always says? People are the craziest monkeys. The people in this whole drama fouled their own nests, and kept doing it over and over.”

Gurney’s image of IRL’s future is vivid. He sees it as years of needing internal CPR.

“Lots of people will be jumping and pounding on other people’s chests,” he said.

This year’s month of May should rekindle some of the buzz. In recent years, the Indy 500 has been mostly an exercise in trying to measure up to the bar set by NASCAR’s Daytona 500. That, and a never-ending photo-op for Danica Patrick.

The old quiver triggered by “Gentlemen, Start Your Engines,” may never quite be duplicated. But if IRL gets close to that again, Friday’s union will become cherished. The newlyweds will have a golden anniversary this time.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. For previous columns, go to latimes.com/dwyre.