Inside CART’s 2001 Texas debacle: Silent running

In the conclusion of RACER’s 3-part Inside CART’s 2001 Texas Debacle series, we rejoin just after the drivers’ G-related secret was revealed to CART’s doctor, and the panic button’s been hit after confirming the cars were too fast for the human mind and body to endure Texas Motor Speedway in their existing technical specification.

The Firestone Firehawk 600 was grinding to a halt as Saturday afternoon transitioned to dusk. The fans who’d just watched qualifying take place didn’t know, and most of the assembled media were unaware. But behind the scenes, in various tents and conference rooms, track and series officials, engine manufacturers, and teams were buckling in for a late night of constant meetings, brainstorming sessions, and something approximating a mass intervention with the 25 remaining drivers.

Dr. Steven Olvey, CART medical director: We had a meeting and I had to lead it, so I took all 25 drivers and said, “How many of you have had these issues with balance, coordination -- you get out of the car and you feel like you ought not to walk and have to sit down for a while?” Nobody said anything for about two or three minutes.

Chris Kneifel, CART chief steward: In terms of drivers, paid drivers, it was really different in those days than it is now. There were a lot of guys making millions, well into the seven figures, a lot of them every year. Five to seven million dollars. And they weren't going to upset the apple cart unless they were told to.

Dr. Steven Olvey: And then, the first one raised his hand, and then somebody else agreed, and then I think it was Helio Castroneves who said, “Yeah, I had that.” And pretty soon, pretty much all admitted to having weird symptoms.

Team Penske's Castroneves, here leading Cristiano da Matta's Newman-Haas Lola, was among those who felt the need to speak up. Motorsport Images

Helio Castroneves: So I remember going to the hotel on that Friday, having dinner, and drinking a lot of water. I was so thirsty. The next day, there was the big drivers meeting and Dr. Olvey was like, “Did you guys feel dizzy?” And I'm thinking like, “Oh, I felt that,” but I didn't raise my hand. I was kind of quiet. And he was like, “Are any of you guys thirsty? Have blackouts, and symptoms like that?” I was like, "Oh, I didn't have a blackout, but man, I was really thirsty."

And I was like, “Should I tell him I felt that? Should I raise my hand?” I didn't know what to say. I was thinking like, “Well, if you feel those things, you should.” But I didn't want to be the first, and then I see a lot of experienced drivers start raising their hands. Like, more than half. I was like, "You know what, I felt that. I'm not going to lie. I felt that.”

As the outpouring of affirmations came in, Dr. Olvey and his friend Dr. Richard Jennings, the NASA flight specialist, were stunned to learn one driver experienced a phenomenon known as G-LOC, the ‘G-force Induced Loss of Consciousness’ while hurtling between Turns 2 and 3 at unabated speed.

If a single miracle was visited upon the Texas event, this was it.

Dr. Steven Olvey: One guy actually had G-LOC. He was unconscious from the entire second turn through the third turn before he came back to consciousness. And the only way he got there without crashing was just muscle memory, basically.

Helio Castroneves: That's when they started to explain about astronauts. They said that if they go to like 4.7 or 5.3 Gs or something like that for 30 seconds, they black out. So, our situation was a little different from going into space, but we were going 30 minutes at 4.5 Gs, 5 Gs. And that's where we're like, this is serious. There was no way to avoid it.

Mike Zizzo: CART VP of Communications 1996-2002, Texas Motor Speedway VP of Communications 2005-2019: To hear drivers that are fearless starting to raise concerns… The one who hit me the most was Alex Zanardi. Alex would race anything, anywhere, at any speed. He felt sorry for some of the younger drivers because he knew they had to drive. They didn't have the clout to say no to their team owners, and there were some owners who I won’t name, because some are there still today, but they all weren’t supportive of stopping.

And Alex said, “I have a choice. I don't have to drive if I don't want to.” But he said, “I'm going to do what everyone else is going to do.” Then PT (Paul Tracy) was probably the most outspoken about the other side of the equation about we need to race regardless.

Kenny Brack: I think Paul and I were the most vocal in the drivers meeting to get on with it. But, of course, it's easy to say that when you didn't experience this G-force problem yourself.

Mike Zizzo: It got very interesting in the drivers meeting. But it wasn't a unanimous, “We're not going to race.”

Although there were a few holdouts among the drivers, the conversations were described as mostly civil and productive. The same could not be said when their bosses and figureheads from the series, track, and engine manufacturers got together behind closed doors.

Chris Kneifel: That race wasn't going to happen. Because with Honda and Toyota, and Ford/Cosworth, they weren't going to agree to do anything.

Robin Miller: They had a meeting Saturday night with the engine manufacturers, and somebody from the track and somebody from CART said, “Look, how about if we put a chicane in the backstretch?" They’re like, “No.” “What if we take the wings off?” “No.” “Well, what if we turn the boost down?” “No.”

They were so desperate to try and figure out a way to keep the race going.

Mike Zizzo: The concern from my side was we had such a difficult recent history with driver fatalities and severe injuries. We’d lost Greg [Moore] and Gonzalo [Rodriguez] in ’99, and that still stung for everyone. So then you have Michael Andretti, maybe the most respected guy we have in the race, talking about how it felt like he had a 30-pound weight on his chest from all the G forces. I’m not gonna lie; it scared us. We got to a point where any idea was on the table. It was as far-fetched as making a chicane out of cones, if it would make things better.

Dr. Steven Olvey: We had all the engine people and anybody that had any mechanical knowledge trying to figure out how can we bring the G curve down and have a decent race. The idea of putting a chicane on the back straight didn’t make any sense. And they wouldn't do anything really with the engines. The engine guys went crazy. They said you'll screw up all the engines and they won't be any good, you'll throw them away.

Mike Hull, managing director, Target Chip Ganassi Racing: One of the big names from an engine manufacturer stood up and should have won an Academy Award for the acting job he put on for why they couldn’t detune their engines. It was reprehensible.

Various technical changes were considered to slow the cars down, but none satisfied all the interested parties. Motorsport Images

Tom German, race engineer for Gil de Ferran, Team Penske: I don't want to say it was a surprise, because we certainly knew we were at unprecedented G levels. And our focus really shifts at that point more to what are the realistic possibilities to slow the cars down? We didn't really go too far down the aerodynamic route. I think we had a pretty good handle on what the options were, and there was nothing that was going to make a significant difference in G loading that we had readily available to us, at the track, to change the aerodynamics.

Another race engineer who declined to be identified for this story recalled a period during a practice session where he was unable to find the point where raising the car would reduce underbody downforce and slow its cornering capabilities:

“We ran out of bright ideas on how to take speed away, I think we wound up at a three-inch front ride height and a five-inch rear ride height. And yet we kept going faster and faster. At Indy, that would be like 0.6 of an inch.”

Tom German: So we really looked at it from a perspective of even getting way outside the box on the engine RPM or the boost level; is it feasible to do something there? It was down to the engine manufacturers to make a big change to the horsepower. But they said they couldn’t because if they’d run at lower RPMs, there were resonances ranges that hadn’t been validated; I remember that as one of the arguments that people were presenting.

Capable of delivering more than 1000hp in qualifying, the beloved 2.65-liter turbo V8 engine formula was mesmerizing for fans and drivers alike. To make such power, small fortunes were spent; it was common to replace the motors in each car, after only 100-200 miles of use, at least once per day. Modern NTT IndyCar Series engines, making far less power, can go 10 times as long between rebuilds. But on the engine front at TMS in 2001, it was high power, high stress, and short life spans.

CART’s circus lived on the edge through the willingness of Ford/Cosworths, Hondas, and Toyotas to burn through bank vaults full of cash for our entertainment. There were also limits to the adventuresome fun.

Without pre-event engine durability testing to try some of the items being floated like running at lower revs, or with less boost to cut power and slow the cars, manufacturers were unwilling to take impromptu tuning risks in the middle of an event.

To German’s point, there were valid reasons to worry about introducing new vibrations and resonances to the motors. But were those concerns great enough to be completely inflexible? And to Hull’s point, the unwillingness to compromise in the slightest manner spoke to the myopic view taken by some in the room.

As engine manufacturers worried about their motors and, moreover, giving up an advantage that might emerge if one brand’s engine performed better in a detuned state, the health of the series and happiness of its new Texan fans were forgotten.

Wally Dallenbach, retiring CART chief steward: There was a fix, but nobody could agree on it. We could have done it with a twist of a wrench. We could have pulled four or five miles an hour out unilaterally from all the cars, take away boost, put in more wing. And nobody wanted it. It got to be a [matter of] selfishness or greed. You couldn't get one group together to support the other group. Everybody said, “Well, if you do that, I'm going to take my cars home.” Nobody could come to a common ground and say, "In order to save the event, let's all do this."

Dr. Steven Olvey: And so this went on went well into the night. We didn't get out of that meeting until about 11 or 11:30.

Robin Miller: Dario [Franchitti] was out walking his dog, I was leaving the track, and I rolled the window down and said, “What are you hearing?” He goes, “It's a cluster ****. Nobody can agree on anything.”

Divided and steeped in self-interest, the parties in charge of putting on Sunday’s Firestone Firehawk 600 left the track for their homes and hotel rooms having failed each other in spectacular ways.

For those who might have prayed for clarity and a fostering brotherhood when meetings resumed in the morning, disappointment was waiting patiently back at TMS.

Wally Dallenbach: We had meetings and meetings and meetings right through the morning of the race. I said, “I'm not going to be responsible for going out there and running at 230mph or whatever and have somebody get killed.”

The schedule called for a final warm-up session from 10-10:30 a.m. TMS also opened its gates at 10 a.m. and started the process of welcoming the first wave of fans into the facility. Kept in the dark, the first alarm bells rang for the crowd when the warm-up was cancelled.

Fans arriving expecting to see the CART warm-up had to settle for pace cars instead... Lesley Ann Miller/Motorsport Images

Having given themselves more time to lobby and debate, CART, TMS, and the engine manufacturers had a hard deadline to meet. With a 2 p.m. race start approaching, 60,000 tickets sold for the audience at TMS, and ESPN ready to air the race live to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the time bomb they’d created was either going to be defused or go off by early afternoon.

Chris Kneifel: I remember a conversation with Joe Heitzler, who was our CART leader at the time, and like me, Joe inherited Texas Speedway, taking on someone else's dirty laundry. I remember he asked me, still trying to figure out a way to save the event, “What would happened if we just raced?” And I told him, “Joe, what will happen is if something goes wrong and it's a multiple-car situation, it would be the equivalent of having a plane crash.”

I said, “We would have a plane crash and it wouldn't just be drivers on the track. It would likely involve spectators or track workers, TV camera people, if the worst-case scenario happened if we raced. And I'm not on board with it. ‘Put the cars in the trucks and let's leave’ is what I've been saying for a long time. We shouldn't be here. And the best way to fix it is to leave, and deal with the rest later.”

Mike Zizzo: Joe asked me what I thought in that last meeting. I said, “I'll be honest with everyone in this room. With everything we know about G forces and the speeds from Dr. Olvey and others, if we lose a driver, CART will be no more. We have to take that into consideration.”

Dr. Steven Olvey: The only choice was to call the race off.

Robin Miller: I called ESPN and said, “They may not run this race, so we better be ready to go live with something,” and Marlo Klain and I were live on "SportsCenter" Sunday morning.

Mike Zizzo: Everyone was making an effort to put on this race from the CART perspective. Everyone was trying to find a solution while keeping it safe for the drivers. I think that gets lost in the story sometimes. We didn't just throw in the towel, and that's why we waited so long to make a decision.

Presented with multiple ways to slow the cars to speeds below the G-LOC threshold, and put on a show for a new Texan fan base, CART, its team owners, engine suppliers, and TMS fired the last bullet into their collective feet. Some of the sport’s greatest negotiators and promoters were in that room. And yet, all the late-night hours spent on Saturday and again on Sunday morning were ultimately wasted: The engines would remain silent when 2 p.m. arrived.

Chris Kneifel: And looking back at it, it's the best decision that I was ever part of.

Wally Dallenbach: We pulled the plug on it and it was an ugly move. We saved some lives that day, and that’s all that matters to me.

Kenny Brack: We were caught between a rock and a hard place, because there were fans in the stands, and we had to go home. It wasn't pleasant.

Dr. Steven Olvey: And it cost CART millions.

Mike Zizzo: Social media didn’t exist back then. There wasn’t an instantaneous way to get the word out and make sure we didn't inconvenience fans by any means. And sure, we knew they'd be disappointed much like all of us, but at least they wouldn't be arriving to the race with anticipation of this great event happening. But the tools didn’t exist like they do today to hit social media and get the word out in an instant.

Chris Kneifel: The only thing that I wish is that the decision would've been made public 24, maybe 36 hours sooner, but I don't have any regrets at all in terms of us not racing there because it wasn't right. There was nothing good happening there.

Mike Zizzo: To this day, that's probably the one thing I just wish we could have done different. Get the information out on Saturday. I think it would have been a lot less heartburn for everyone involved because from a Texas Motor Speedway perspective, you have 60,000 fans coming to your venue and then you feel a bit embarrassed as CART pulls the plug on the event while they’re sitting there. There was a lot of hard feelings the way it all unfolded.

One final act was required on Sunday. At approximately 12:00 p.m., a press conference would be held to break the news that the Firestone Firehawk 600 would be postponed for an undefined date, to give the series and its partners time to tweak its TMS formula and return to race at lower speeds.

And don’t believe for a moment that peace and love was found between the warring factions on the way to the rostrum. Or, more accurately, the rostrums.

Robin Miller: The way CART handled it with Jabbering Joe Heitzler was comical. Jabbering Joe had a press conference and he wanted (TMS president Eddie) Gossage to come in with him. Gossage says, "I'm having my own press conference."

Mike Zizzo: When we decided that we're not going to hold the race, we had to get together on both sides, come up with our strategy, a little crisis management in terms of your press conference on who's going to be our speakers and such. I went to the TMS side and said, “Hey, does Eddie want to join us? We need a united front here and we'll have a press conference and we'll work on messaging to make sure that we're all aligned on what we're going to say about the event, etc.” They come back to me and Eddie told me, "No, we're going to have two separate press conferences.” And I was like, “Well, I don't think that's the way, you know, we should go...”

And he says, “Well, that's the way I want to go.” And I said, “Well, OK.” And of course I said, “Well, since you're the host, Eddie, you can go first.” The reason for that was that I wanted to hear what he said before we had to go on and do our press conference. And he said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, you're the guest. You get to go first.”

It was his facility, it was his race weekend, so we went first and just had Dr. Olvey explain about the large amount of G forces. If I recall correctly, I think it was a 23-second lap and they had sustained G forces each lap for like 18 of the 23 seconds. You basically needed a G suit to race.

In front of their partisan congregations, Gossage vented and CART faced the music. Despite shouldering most of the blame, the series would later thank one of racing’s most famous surnames for cultivating goodwill among some influential reporters in attendance.

Mike Zizzo: We had our press conference and I had to recruit drivers to join us. I had, and still do have a ton of respect for Michael Andretti. I said, “Michael, can you please do this press conference?” I said, “The Andretti name…and you're one of our biggest stars.” And he's like, “Yeah, I don't know.” He didn't want to get in the middle of it and I don't blame him, but I pleaded with him because I said, “It's so important to the series that we put you out front.” He was gracious enough to do it and help out CART at that time.

Robin Miller: CART, in USA Today, the Indy Star, and some big newspapers, they were heroes because they put driver safety first. Other than Eddie Gossage going off on them, they got fabulous coverage for taking care of the drivers.

In what’s been described as feeling like a death notice had been delivered, tens of thousands of fans were informed the race would not be held. It went over like a proverbial fart in church.

Dr. Steven Olvey: The people in the stands, of course, they went nuts, called all our drivers sissies and babies and all that kind of thing.

Race ticket holders weren't interested in the explanations for the abrupt cancellation. Phil Sedgwick/Motorsport Images

Mike Zizzo: There were fans screaming at drivers and calling them cowards. We're getting booed and stuff thrown on us when we're leaving, and there were tons of people still coming into the track for the race.

As hostilities grew, one pit crew member recalls receiving explicit instructions to swiftly exit as a sizable number of fans vented their frustrations.

“It was really sobering on race day,” he said. “We weren’t sure what was going to happen. After the race was cancelled with 60,000-something fans there waiting for a show, our team manager told us to go change out of our team gear, put on our street clothes; the most Joe Normal things we had to blend in with the fans, take off any parking passes on the car and anything that might I.D. us as members of a racing team, and get out of there as fast as we could in case it went bad.”

With the race cars packed away in their transporters and sent down the road for a race the next weekend in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, the CART paddock moved on from Texas as quickly as the speed limit allowed. The three-day saga, born from all manner of mistakes, would become an infamous chapter in a year that brought CART to its knees.

Intensified by Zanardi’s sickening crash at the CART race in Germany just four days after 9/11 -- when a similar sentiment of not wanting to race was expressed, this time, out of respect for the lives lost in the terrorist attacks -- the once-proud series was becoming unrecognizable.

Safely removed from the rightfully outraged TMS fans and the immediacy of Gossage’s scorn, CART took the safe and predictable route of announcing the Texas race would not be rescheduled. Signed as a three-year deal, the bad blood accrued throughout the ordeal ensured the experiment would not survive beyond 2001.

In a subsequent lawsuit filed by TMS for a breach of everything, CART was rumored to write a check for $3.5 million in a private settlement that served as a deserving end to a miserable marriage.

Mike Zizzo: It's crazy it's been 20 years. I look back and I still don't see a reason to play the blame game. It was a lose-lose for everyone. This was going to be a great event for Texas Motor Speedway. It was going to be a great event for CART. We both lost on this one.

If there’s a sense of pride to be found amid the regret within this grand fiasco, it’s in the decision to protect CART’s most valuable assets.

Helio Castroneves: The promoters, some of the team owners…everybody's upset. But I have to say that if Dr. Olvey and the drivers weren’t united that day that we shouldn’t race, probably someone would not be here to tell the story.

Oriol Servia: I was in a very small, rookie team. For us, we had a great qualifying, which was huge. The car felt great. This was going to be a big deal for us. And I cannot tell you how relieved I was that the event was canceled. I mean, it was absolutely the right thing to do. It was going to be a disaster. We couldn't do more than 10, 15 laps without losing control of our bodies. It was that extreme, it really was.

Wally Dallenbach: And the fact of the matter was it was a very unfriendly move that had to be made and we took the responsibility with the support of the doctors and the support of some of the drivers that it was a good move. I was very disappointed and a lot of us were brokenhearted that we had to do that. I took the fall for it, and I'm OK with it. But I would have never lived it down if we'd have killed a driver there knowing that we had a problem. And we did have a problem; we were going too damn fast for the configuration of a mile and a half racetrack.

Lessons were learned, but few have regrets over the decision taken to cancel. Motorsport Images

Mike Zizzo: Looking back, one, I wish we probably would have done more due diligence in terms of testing, but no one could have predicted the speeds would have gone as high as they did. The biggest thing is I wish we could have only needed to postpone it. I just felt terrible for the fans. I just wish we didn't hurt the fans. But to this day, I still think it was the right decision.

I don't think a lot of us could have lived with ourselves if we would've lost a driver that day just to put on a show. It was basically like putting jet fighters on a track. And it's all about the drivers’ safety, whether or not due diligence was done. It's always about the drivers’ safety. You should never sacrifice a driver for an event. And I live by that today.

The glorious series founded in 1979, responsible for some of the greatest Indy car racing the sport has known, limped through the 2002 and 2003 seasons before declaring bankruptcy. A handful of wealthy CART team owners bought the series and relaunched it as Champ Car in 2004, which survived through early 2008 and faded into history when another collapse and the ensuing purchase by the Indy Racing League led to its permanent shuttering.

Max Papis, driver, Team Rahal: I still believe that the race pace would have been dramatically slower and we would have not had any problem. I think the race pace would have been in the 210s, and I don't think it would have been at 230mph. But in hindsight, if they would've asked me, I was ready to jump in the car and race, simple as that. Maybe I pissed a lot of people off when I tell them that I was ready to race, but I was. I would not lie and that's why I'm a true, genuine competitor.

When I look back at it, it was maybe what CART deserved in that moment. So many bad mistakes made that they contributed to the sport's collapse. This was maybe one of the things that people should have looked at and said, “Yeah, we're making many mistakes.” Instead, they kept drinking the Kool-Aid until the thing shut down. To me, that was the saddest part and it ended up with a bankruptcy of one of the most amazing sports. I tell people I won some CART races, and they don't even know what it is.

Most people with a reasonable understanding of all that went down in Texas would place the heaviest blame on the series’ side. CART, as a business and sports entertainment organization, failed its paddock, sponsors, and fans. It’s an indisputable truth.  

But there’s an underlying tone that’s emerged since 2001 and it doesn’t sit well with one of its former officials as a steady drumbeat of blame continues to flow from the track’s president against an organization that no longer exists. 

Chris Kneifel:

Invited to take part in this feature series, Gossage declined, citing a lack of desire to rehash the past while in a partnership today with the NTT IndyCar Series. 

Of note, and while in partnership with the NTT IndyCar Series, Gossage rehashed the subject in 2015 on the event’s 15th anniversary in a NBC Sports web feature. Created with the assistance of TMS, the story, which paints a flattering portrait of Gossage as a whistleblower and victim, caught Kneifel’s attention.

Another story on the event’s 19th anniversary, this time with The Indianapolis Star, and while TMS was in partnership with the NTT IndyCar Series, followed a similar one-dimensional pattern as the track president rehashed 2001 while apportioning 100% of the blame on CART. 

This, too, drew Kneifel’s ire. 

Chris Kneifel: I

One might draw the conclusion that Kneifel and his mentor would be satisfied if Gossage dialed down the rhetoric from 100% blame to 99. 

Wally Dallenbach:

Gossage isn’t without sympathy for his views, though.

Robin Miller:

It seems fitting how the some of the same people who couldn’t agree on how to save the Firestone Firehawk 600 back in 2001 are unable to find common ground or extend olive branches 20 years later.

There’s a strange piece of history from the event sitting in Kenny Brack’s house. It’s the trophy he received -- a helmet, of all things -- for winning the pole at a race that never happened. In typical fashion for the Swede, a marvelous yarn was spun.

Kenny Brack:

The opening day of practice for CART at Texas Motor Speedway was April 27, 2001, and we know how that story ended. That date is also tied with another infamous failure for CART as the film that carried hopes of bringing the series mainstream acclaim and stardom went down in flames as one of the worst racing movies ever made.

Mike Zizzo: