IRL boss George has only one speed

May 11, 2008|Steve Herman, Associated Press

INDIANAPOLIS - Tony George is the last man standing, and his realm extends far beyond the four turns of Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Heir to the auto racing empire his grandfather Tony Hulman created from a decaying, weed-infested track after World War II, George took a huge gamble when he founded the Indy Racing League in the mid-1990s.

Vilified by many at the time, George abandoned the established Championship Auto Racing Teams, touching off an often bitter feud that fractured open-wheel racing for more than a decade. But he persisted, expanding not only the IRL but also putting his stamp on the speedway and auto racing in ways his grandfather never would have imagined. On top of that, he runs his own race team, Vision Racing, as well as two family-owned companies based in Terre Haute.

And when CART, which morphed into the Champ Car World Series, went bankrupt amid a steady drain of teams and drivers to the IRL in recent years, George engineered a buyout of the rival series this past winter and achieved the long-awaited unification of the two open-wheel series.

The 48-year-old is busy.

"I try to compartmentalize things and I try being involved at a high level in all aspects of our business," George said. "But I have good people in operational roles, both in the league and the Speedway. . . . You're as good as the people you surround yourself with, and I've been fortunate to be able to surround myself with some pretty good people."

He became track president in 1990 after the death of Joe Cloutier. Hulman's right-hand man for 30 years, Cloutier was seemingly stuck in a management style that didn't adapt to a changing sport that already was losing fans, revenue, and its TV audience to NASCAR. Open-wheel racing, George said, needed a boss more than a board of directors. He was that man.

The CART board was restructured in 1992 to be composed of five car owners, with George and then-CART chairman William Stokkan as nonvoting members. Stokkan resigned at the end of the 1993 season, and the board was restructured again with 16 team owners as members. George then resigned from the board in January 1994, complaining he never really had the respect of its members.

That's when he decided to go it alone.

Renovations of the Speedway's garages, walls, and pit areas, a new scoring tower and media center, an 18-hole championship golf course, new suites, and fan-friendly attractions were only cosmetic changes. He also broke a one-race-a-year tradition by bringing NASCAR to the track for the Brickyard 400 in 1994, and didn't stop there.