Roger - always smartest man in the room right? - what was he doing in the early '90s? He started up a Winston Cup team, with Rusty Wallace as his driver.

NASCAR had already passed IndyCar by 1995. Jeff Gordon winning the inaugural 1994 Brickyard 400 was about as poetic a moment as you could ever ask for in motorsports. It demonstrated everything right with NASCAR and everything wrong with CART/USAC/open wheel racing at the time. Frankly I don't think much would have changed if no IRL existed. The series would've done then what it's doing now which is leaving the ovals, NASCAR was still on fire then and took over all that audience, they went to take on Bernie and F1, which let's be honest, was really stupid because the FIA would never let them win - the same organization intentionally killed their own sportscar series multiple times to remove a threat to F1 - and when tobacco sponsorship was killed in the early '00s (Player's, Marlboro, KOOL, Hollywood, sure there's others I'm missing), there went all your sponsorship funding outside of ride buyers. NASCAR was able to replace Winston, Camel, Kodiak, Skoal, etc. Indycar never did, and still hasn't.

I looked at modern racing now and in a way it's really depressing. Money has so completely destroyed the sport. F1 is horrendous to watch. Nothing in the race matters outside of the start, a few laps around the pit stops, and tire management. A team not named Mercedes, Red Bull, or Ferrari have won a race since the 2013 Australian GP (season opener), won by Kimi Raikkonen in a Lotus. If you remove the Ferrari intra-team turmoil this year, seriously, what is left to talk about? There's actually good racing in F1...7th on back, so no one cares about it.

NASCAR has likewise devolved into the Indian caste system. Kyle Busch could get in a JTG Daugherty car and is not finishing in the top 15. It's even gotten to the point of you have open factory teams which is something I never thought I would see in NASCAR Cup Racing. Yeah, Hendrick was always the favored Chevy team, but other Chevy teams could race and win. Toyota has 5 cars, period. 4 of them are Gibbs and the 5th car pay a huge amount of money to Gibbs. That's incredibly MotoGP-ish.

There's a lot negative to be said about the Split. Frankly, I don't wish to rehash because it's been done for decades now on the internet and I don't desire to kill my brain cells yelling at a keyboard, but the sport is just whittling away and dying unless you're born rich. Tony George did not cause that, if anything he was a reactionary that was foolishly you could argue trying to stop what racing has become. I love racing, have since I was 5 years old. I'm 37 now and I just don't see much of a future. I have kids and while I'd support them if they wanted to race, in a way the finances of it all scare me, and I have a damn good job compared to most people.