Originally Posted by wright59:
Sorry Cecil98 but obviously don't know jack**** about Indy car racing, half of the teams you mentioned were running the Indy 500 long before the Cart/IRL split. Galles, Hemalgarn, Menards and a few others. You just ramble about BS that you don't have a clue about. Might want to check some of your facts about the Indy 500.
You may be right about my knowledge of Indy Racing, wright59, however, if you take a look at the teams I mentioned as founding teams of the IRL you will find that only a handfull participated in the 500 before the IRL and of those, only Galles racing ran the full CART/Indy Car circuit. By 1995 Galles was becoming uncompetitive at Indy and CART with Adrian Fernandez and Marco Greco driving for him. Hemelgarn and Byrd were only small one-off Indy participants during the CART years and Menard, while not considered underfunded, only ran the 500, as well, until the founding of the IRL, at which point they began a full time IRL team. Needless to say, after the "sell-out" to the Honda/Toyota Leases and the influx of Penske/Ganassi/Andretti-Green into the series, 95% of these small teams dried up and disappeared. Also, no one here suggested that the IRL inspired the founding of "all" of these teams but, some teams were formed because of the league. With the new economic package the IRL presented, many of these smaller teams saw the opportunity to run the entire series and did. The fact that some existed before the IRL/CART split doesn't mean they weren't "founding teams" of the IRL......
