BONUS: Indycar at war! Ep. 3 - Peace in our time
Bring Back V10s - Classic F1 stories
The Race Media Ltd
4.9 • 764 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2026
⏱️ 83 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our Indycar Split series concludes by looking at how the CART/IRL war finally came to an end after more than a decade of fighting.
But before we get to that, we have to talk about one of the biggest fights that took place during the split: the battle over who really won the 2002 Indy 500.
Glenn Freeman, Edd Straw and Indy Split book author John Oreovicz dig back in great detail over what happened between Penske IRL driver Helio Castroneves and Team Green CART driver Paul Tracy, who were battling for the lead on the penultimate lap of the race when the yellow flags came out for a crash.
We also look into CART's decline and ultimate collapse, as its teams and engine manufacturers started switching full-time to the IRL.
And finally we revisit the story of how the two sides finally came together, as well as asking if there really was a winner once the war was over and Indycar racing was reunited again in 2008.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's been plenty of open wheel hatred in the last 12 years. |
| 0:05.9 | Honestly, I felt I got screwed. |
| 0:12.0 | Get past the hate and start figuring out where open wheel racing goes from here and how it can be made better. |
| 0:26.6 | The IRL, as it is called, is a concept originated by the president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Tony George. |
| 0:28.6 | I hate the fact that the Nd-500 was screwed up 12 years ago. |
| 0:31.6 | I hate the fact that Alex Zanardi and Greg Moore didn't get to run the ND-500. |
| 0:34.6 | I hate the fact that NASCAR's laughed several times. |
| 0:40.3 | Consider the Indy cars. |
| 0:43.4 | Well, this year they will race in separate series. |
| 0:45.5 | You took a strip like this. |
| 0:46.8 | We came back here. |
| 0:50.7 | I think we redeemed ourselves from the lousy thing we did in 95. |
| 0:53.8 | But I'll tell you, it's the best day on my life coming back like this. |
| 0:54.9 | Who needs milk? |
| 1:02.0 | The finish line is in sight for our special series on the IndyCar Split. |
| 1:06.8 | By the end of this episode, we will have reunited the IRL and Champcar, but we've got some bumpy terrain to get over before we reach that point. |
| 1:10.1 | And as you'll expect by now, |
| 1:12.0 | plenty of controversy. John Oriovitz and Ed Straw are back with me, Glenn Freeman, for the grand |
| 1:17.6 | finale where we can decide if this story actually reached a happy ending or not. And once we've done that, |
| 1:23.7 | we're going to put out a post on the race members club for you to ask us questions about |
| 1:28.6 | the split and John will rejoin us for a special members only Q&A so we can talk about this |
| 1:34.0 | endlessly fascinating story. Some more. We ended our second episode though with Penske's |
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