Increasing the car count

[SevenGrain]

It looks as if CART's car count may be as low as 17 or 18 entries, it's lowest ever. Many of the promoter's contracts require a minimum of 18 cars and some require 20. Perhaps CART can take a page from the history books and try something.

In 1981, after the CART/USAC split Pocono was a USAC holdout, and CART chose not to participate in the 1981 Pocono 500. I believe that there were only 12 champ cars actually entered. In order to get a full field of cars, USAC added Silver Crown cars to the field. An over the hill A.J. Foyt won that race, the last win of his career.

Perhaps CART could take the top four or five finishers of the Toyota Atlantic race and add them to the CART field. In order to account for the difference in speed, year-old Champ Cars can be made available to the Atlantic teams. (I'd imagine Roger Penske, Gerald Forsythe, and Larry Blair have a few they don't need sitting around that they'd sell cheap) Toyota may be willing to supply a few engines as it would be a great publicity boost to the Toyota Atlantic series.

Even if they just put them out there in the Atlantic cars, they'd be no worse off than Hiro Matsu****a, Luis Garcia, Arndt Meier or Denis Vitolo, all of whom held up the lead lap cars rather well.