In any event, a lot of George’s share of the Speedway’s money has been spent on the IRL in the last 12 years for precious little return and it would be hard to describe him as a winner at this stage. The key for George will be re-building the IRL in the image of CART (i.e with major North American road racing and street circuits on the schedule with ovals). But this time American driving stars need to be prominently featured.

2. Gerald Forsythe and Kevin Kalkhoven — Say what you will about the rich, they tend to notice negative cash flow sooner or later. Inevitably, the Champ Car owners had to remind themselves they didn’t get rich by bleeding money. That is a dramatically different position from George, whose family did get rich from racing, among other enterprises, and could afford to wait out Forsythe and Kalkhoven, as he had their predecessors. Those predecessors at CART, meanwhile, squandered millions from an initial public offering that temporarily caught Wall Street’s fancy while George built up his financing by adding the Brickyard 400 and the U.S. Grand Prix at Indy.

3. CART — When Tony George inaugurated the hated 25/33 rule at Indianapolis in the first year of the IRL, reserving the majority of spaces for league members only, the CART teams howled and attempted revenge by running a 500-mile race at Michigan the same day. Had they run for points at Orlando and Phoenix to defeat George’s lockout, the IRL may well have been stillborn. The CART owners remained in denial about the importance of the Indy 500 until Chip Ganassi broke out and came back in 2000.

4. Buddy Lazier — The heroic victory in the first IRL race at Indy in 1996 by Lazier, still suffering from a broken back, gave a huge psychological boost versus the huge and embarassing starting line crash by the CART teams in Michigan the same day. It also helped the sport move past the death of Indy pole winner Scott Brayton in a practice crash.

5. Tony Stewart, Dario Franchitti, Sam Hornish Jr. — You can’t sell tickets or TV time without star drivers and these guys’ choice over the years to pursue NASCAR careers underscored that fact for both sides of the open-wheel war at various times. Bleeding star drivers is the same as bleeding money.

5. Chip Ganassi, Roger Penske and Michael Andretti — When these team owners switched to the IRL with the financial inducement from Toyota and Honda over the course of three years from 2000-2003, the handwriting was on the wall. Ganassi started it all by winning with Juan Pablo Montoya at Indy in 2000 the day after CART ran at, um, Nazareth.

6. Danica Patrick — She passed Dan Wheldon with 11 laps to go and led 19 laps over-all before finishing fourth. Danica Mania in 2005 proved beyond the shadow of doubt the status of the Indy 500 versus any other open-wheel race in America.

7. Alex Zanardi — If an American road racing fan can see a future F1 world champion, they are more likely to buy a ticket. And, as the CART owners learned again and again, ticket sales and fan enthusiasm remains the heart of the business. When the charismatic and talented Zanardi failed to be competitive after his move from two-time CART champion back into F1, it removed some of the lustre of the American series. Juan Pablo Montoya won races when he switched to F1 after succeeding Zanardi as a CART champion, but hardly reclaimed the mantle of world champion-in-waiting established by Jacques Villeneuve. While not decisive, these developments hurt CART’s gate appeal in the U.S. It remains to be seen if George’s league can do any better along these lines with drivers like Graham Rahal and Marco Andretti. Or how well former Champ Car champ Sebastien Bourdais goes in F1.

8. Honda and Toyota — The representatives of these manufacturers never could figure out how to explain the split in American open-wheel racing to their bosses in Japan, who only knew about that piece of Americana in Indiana. The Japanese also knew they could spend more money on the Indy 500 than GM or Ford — and that they were not getting their money’s worth out of CART’s air time on TV. Cost containment was never an issue at CART, where team owners instead constantly pursued a strategy of coming up with more money than their rivals.

9. Dan Gurney and Leo Mehl — Gurney helped launch CART in 1978, which was very much needed at a time when open-wheel racing was rudderless under USAC. The Speedway was rudderless, too, back in the days when the George family was entangled by personal problems, not the least being the death of George’s grandfather Tony Hulman and father Elmer George in successive years. Mehl was nominated at the infamous Houston meeting of CART to run a new structure proposed by George in 1992. Had either of these men been put in charge of American open-wheel racing for any substantial period of time, things very well could have been far different and for the better. Alas, Gurney and Mehl were too rational and knowledgeable in a branch of American racing where an oversized ego seems to be a prerequisite.

10. The USAC board of directors — A tragic plane crash in the cornfields of Indiana claimed the lives of several prominent members of the USAC board of directors in 1978. This crash helped open the door to the much-needed formation of CART, whose model of street courses, road circuits, ovals and the Indy 500 remains quite possibly the best form of racing to ever hit America. With some luck (i.e. the arrival of more charismatic American stars), we may see it rise again.

Jonathan Ingram can be reached at jonathan@jingrambooks.com.