In 1978, the legendary Dan Gurney composed a white paper that he shared with all of the owners of the USAC National Championship Series. It was the first cornerstone of what would eventually become Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART), and it was a manifesto whose reverberations echo even today.

In the final analysis, the formation of CART only led to short-term gains before the same self-interest and infighting that caused Gurney to write the white paper in the first place resulted in the catastrophic IndyCar split. But in the short space of time in which the CART owners heeded the call to action and vowed to become more collaborative, IndyCar racing achieved some frankly incredible goals - including, at one point, being a viable contender with Formula 1 as the world's most popular category of closed-course racing.

It is in Gurney's spirit that we now respond to the rumors of yet another attempted coup within the IndyCar power ranks with a white paper of our own - a fans' manifesto, if you will. Scholars of the sport may wish to compare the two documents to see what has changed over the course of thirty-plus years, and what has not. You may find there is a surprising amount of similarity, for it is axiomatic that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

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INDYCAR has set Friday, May 25, 2012 as the deadline for interested manufacturers to commit to building aerodynamic kits for the 2013 and 2014 season.

Regulations governing the so-called "aero kits" - bodywork pieces including engine covers, front and rear wings, and sidepods which are fitted over the base Dallara-built "safety cell" chassis - were issued to interested companies on May 14.

The aero kit concept was introduced as low-cost alternative to the historic practice of companies such as Lola, March, and Dallara building entirely new racecars from the ground up every two or three years. The aero kits are intended to allow for aerodynamic development and competition between different manufacturers while maintaining a safety baseline by basing the aero kits on a common "safety cell."

Teams will be allowed to make a maximum of two switches to new INDYCAR-approved aero kits from the current 2012 Dallara-developed bodywork during the 2013 and 2014 seasons, for a maximum of three kits over the two-year period. Aero kit costs to teams will be capped at $75,000 per kit, which includes both oval and road/street course bodywork.

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Ten years ago last month, Buck Baker died.

When I first saw the news, I sat for a while looking at the words, not really comprehending. Buck was not exactly a spring chicken when he died - in fact, he was 83. So it's not that he was too young to go, or that he died before realizing his true greatness. Anyone who knew Buck knew that he was great because he was... Buck.

It's just that I always thought the sumbitch was too tough and mean to die.

A whole generation of race fans is following stock car racing without ever hearing of Elzie Wylie "Buck" Baker, except perhaps as the father of former racer Buddy Baker (who himself is best known for his TV career to today's fans). And perhaps that's why NASCAR doesn't feel as soulless to them as it occasionally does to me.

Maybe, though, Buck's induction yesterday into the NASCAR Hall of Fame might inspire one or two fans to get to know the guy. Lord knows that anyone who puts any stock into NASCAR's rough-hewn, blue-collar image (which is basically window dressing at this point) ought to at least read up on Buck and his contemporaries.

Thankfully, before he went to that great speakeasy in the sky to kick the shit with his pals, I got to share a meal with him... and what an experience it was.

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Jean Alesi is 47 years old. He is an ex-Formula 1 driver who is notable more for his bad luck than his career results. He is also an official ambassador for Lotus Cars.

Today, in the first phase of Rookie Orientation Practice (ROP) at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Alesi - for the first time in over ten years - stepped into an open-wheel car and took his first-ever laps on an oval track in a Lotus-powered Dallara fielded by Fan Force United, a team which until recently was a competitor in the Firestone Indy Lights Series.

Alesi's best lap behind the wheel of the Fan Force Lotus/Dallara was 186.367 miles per hour, 30mph slower than the next-slowest rookie. It was a speed that would have been the third-slowest qualifying speed for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Talladega the previous weekend.

For his first laps in an IndyCar - especially one powered by the lowly Lotus/Judd engine - they weren't all that bad. But because Alesi's ride was bought and paid for by Lotus almost as a lark, Alesi's doubters in the fan ranks exploded onto social media, eager to give his seat away to someone else (never mind that the seat wouldn't exist without Lotus or Alesi).

"This guy doesn't belong in an IndyCar at the Indianapolis 500." That was the prevailing sentiment... and one that has been repeated about other drivers over time as well. But it is a sentiment that could not be more wrong.

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Coming into the Month of May, it seems as though that we have a bit of division about whether or not this year's Indy 500 will be as "classic" as it has been in years past. To that end, there's been a bit of infighting amongst the fans about whether the glass is half full or filled with liquid despair and decroded feces.

With this in mind, I believe that the best way to inaugurate the festivities at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway this year is a paraphrase of that great American philosopher (and, tragically, Chicago Blackhawks fan) Clark W. Griswold, to wit:

I think you're all f***ed in the head! We're a couple of weeks from the green flag and you want to bail out. Well, I'll tell you something, this is no longer a MOTOR RACE, it's a quest. It's a quest for fun! I'm gonna have fun and you're gonna have fun, we're all gonna have so much f***ing fun we'll need plastic surgery to remove our g******n smiles! You'll be whistling "Back Home Again" out of your a**holes! I gotta be crazy; I'm on a pilgrimage to see a milk bottle! Praise Gomer Pyle! Oh, sh*t!

Remember that the next time you lose your marbles and click around to see what the Legions of the Miserable (© George Phillips, all rights reserved) are saying lately.

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The month of May is just over a week old, but already the battle lines are drawn.

In one corner are the loyalists, the die-hards, the true believers for whom the grand dame at 16^th and Georgetown is Mecca.

In another corner are loyalists of another stripe - fans who were reluctantly "unified" after years of conflict, fans who spent years doggedly whittling down the importance of the Greatest Spectacle in their minds to satisfy their chosen series' politics.

Then there is a third group, the great (and, some say, largely theoretical) mass of "event fans," composed of the same people who tune in every year for the Kentucky Derby, the U.S. Open, the Super Bowl, and other "keystone" events but largely ignore the sport in question the rest of the time.

The challenge before INDYCAR is to figure out a way to satisfy all three of those groups. In fact, it is arguably INDYCAR's biggest challenge if it hopes to survive in the future.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the dangers of gloom-and-doom pessimism and the penchant for IndyCar fans to overindulge themselves in it. I still stand by that assessment.

But there is a flip side to that equation that is just as dangerous as wallowing in a morass of Chicken Little philosophy.

Like all businesses, INDYCAR and its assorted partners need to have a positive self-image in order to keep revenues flowing in and maintain their customer base. So with the outlets they possess, they will pursue, shall we say, an aggressively optimistic public stance. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, either.

The problem comes when an aggressively optimistic public stance mutates beyond that yardstick and becomes a fantasy construct, wherein the expectation for the consumer is not simply to have a positive mental attitude about the business, but is in fact encouraged to willfully minimize or even ignore the product's shortcomings out of a sense of loyalty -worse, a loyalty that the business intimates is violated by any hint of second-guessing.

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IT'S MAY!!!

(Video courtesy of the IndyCar YouTube Channel)

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It seemed too good to be true at the time - three engine manufacturers after years of Honda exclusivity.

As it turns out, it was too good to be true, especially for the poor folks who were (and, in a couple of instances, still are) saddled with the Judd-built Lotus engine.

The thrill of the black-and-gold and green-and-gold on the IZOD IndyCar Series grid has long since vanished in the harsh light of a motor that looks only a step above Fred Flintstone's feet in terms of torque and overall power. We didn't even know how poor the engine was until a couple of races into the season because none of the Lotus teams seemed to be able to get a balky set of ECUs to play nicely with the powerplants.

It got bad enough that two Lotus teams - Dreyer and Reinbold Racing and Bryan Herta Autosport - have jumped ship. The nightmare scenario of being certain also-rans at the Indianapolis 500 led them to leap off a philosophical cliff and hope they learned to fly with another manufacturer before they hit the ground.

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ARE YOU READY TO SAMBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA???

Okay, that didn't work as well as I had hoped to get you psyched up for this week's Paddock Pulse, but HEY AT LEAST I TRIED DAMMIT.

You SHOULD be excited about this week's Pulse because it features all sorts of good stuff, including the triumphant return of Simba, Mark Wilkinson pondering the end times, and a blog so lengthy from the Dalb-meister that an obscure sect of Viking descendants living on the outskirts of Toledo, Ohio, have adopted it as their village's epic poem.

That's just not something you can find in other sports - hell, the best football can do is Deion Sanders live-tweeting his kids' gradual transformation into Jerry Springer guests.

Hit the jump and be enthralled.

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(From Simraceway PR)

Ignite Game Technologies ("Ignite") and the IZOD IndyCar Series today announced the Silicon Valley-based video game company will develop the next official IndyCar game and release it on its online racing platform, Simraceway (http://simraceway.com/).

The title will include all the teams and tracks from current and future IZOD IndyCar Series and Firestone Indy Lights races in live, full-size re-creations of each season, authentic vehicle physics affirmed by current IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti, and millimeter-perfect tracks produced by highly-accurate laser-scanning techniques. While its launch date is yet to be announced, Ignite will be releasing details of its full feature set shortly, as well as a range of IndyCar content, including the brand new 2012 car, the DW-12.

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Early this week, we were treated to the somewhat unbelievable sight on Twitter of Mario Andretti calling out Graham Rahal for dissing the Andretti family name to the Associated Press.

Now, I can't stress this enough - Mario Andretti is at an age where most of his contemporaries set cheese out to feed their computer mouse, and yet the guy laid down the Twitter smackdown with the aplomb of a basement-dwelling teenager. That deserves respect. Then again, he IS one of the greatest racecar drivers of all time.

Graham, for his part, seemed surprised at the callout, which isn't too big of a shock because Graham is only 26 and the days when the Associated Press was considered the capo di tutti capi of the media world are as far behind us as those when everyone got their news from actual newspapers. So he could be forgiven, maybe, for thinking that his dropping a verbal assloaf on the Andretti family to the AP might not cause the ruckus it ended up causing.

What does this mean for us? TRAIN WRECK, BABY! That's right - it's rubbernecking glory! Amazingly enough, though, Twitter War III barely resulted in a mention or two in this week's Pulse links, so maybe the blogosphere is maturing a little.

Once you stop laughing at that last line, please hit the jump for this week's links.

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I'm not very good at math. It's one of the reasons why I'm a writer and not, as I wished I could be as a kid, an astronaut. But if pressured, I can still solve rudimentary equations - particularly if that is a requirement for an important decision.

Josef Newgarden faced an equation of his own as he strapped into his #67 Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing Dallara DW12 on the grid in Long Beach, California on Sunday. It was less an equation of numbers than of variables, but it was an equation that required a solution nonetheless.

The situation in which Newgarden found himself was not an alien one if you look at his past career. Ahead of him was a pace car and vast swaths of open track. Only one other car was alongside him, and the rest of the field was arrayed in formation behind his rear wing. The car next to him held a multiple INDYCAR champion - the Scot with the Italian name, the superstar spouse, and a seat with one of the two most dominating IndyCar teams of the past two decades.

It was rarefied air Newgarden was breathing, yes - sitting on the outside pole position with Dario Franchitti in the biggest INDYCAR street race of the year. But Newgarden, far from being intimidated, had made a startling conclusion based upon his own mental calculus.

He was going to go for the race lead in the first turn of the first lap.

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Off weeks suck, so naturally we're going to have four of them before the Indy 500 festivities get under way. Fortunately, we'll also have Long Beach and Sao Paulo in there somewhere, so we won't be WHOLLY bereft of IndyCar racing action.

Of course, the big question for us going into the pre-Indy stretch is, "If a great race happens on the track and nobody watches it on TV, did it really happen?" The other big question is whether we can get an electron microscope to be able to see the ratings from the next NBC Sports Network broadcast. (I think that one might be possible. I know a guy.)

But those are questions for another day - this post-off-week Pulse features some interesting variety ranging from an interview with an ex-racer-turned-drug-kingpin to a tell-all blog about former Firestone Indy Lights chief Roger Bailey.

We can jump off the ratings bridge later - hit THIS jump for some bloggy goodness!

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"You're such a pessimist."

We were having an argument about something, as is the wont for most married couples. I thought I was expressing healthy skepticism, and my wife couldn't imagine why I would want to.

I don't know what she was expecting as a rejoinder to her accusation, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't laughter. But before she could get more angry because she thought I was mocking her, I responded in a way that turned her fury into confusion:

"I'm not a pessimist. I'm an IndyCar fan."

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Ssssssssssssssssssssssssss...

Oh, hi. Didn't hear you walk in. I was just going over the ratings report from the Barber race and... um... checking the venturi valves on this gas-powered oven! Yeah.

Anyhoo, approximately the same number of people who follow me on Twitter who aren't spambots got to see a tremendously entertaining and well-executed IZOD IndyCar Series race in Alabama this past weekend. There were almost as many people actually AT the race as there were tuned in on the boob tube.

Predictably, this has led to a rash of howling and gnashing of the teeth and so forth, which as we all know is completely atypical for IndyCar fans. I mean, everyone saw that top-ten finish from Sebastien Bourdais and the Lotus coming, right? No? Well, hmm.

To get back on track, you'll get a bunch more feedback on this week's race in the latest Pulse links. Most of it was written pre-ratings, so I'm sure the Sylvia-Plath-level stuff will be delayed until next week. Enjoy!

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Media relationships are a tricky business. In order to get people to respond to you in anything other than clichés or dismissive silence, you need to get as close to them as you can without compromising your objectivity.

It's a balancing act that only the best in the business can pull off, and because I'm certainly not anywhere near being one of those, I frequently find myself too far on one side or the other.

It's one of the reasons why I dread writing critiques of any sort, but particularly of racing broadcasts. I know and like many of the people involved in racing broadcasting, and no matter how carefully I couch my criticisms I always feel guilty for making them, as if my assessment of a network's performance is an aggression against my friendships and acquaintanceships with the people tasked to carry it off.

But regardless of my qualms about treading on people's toes, sometimes criticisms need to be made - and after two races in the 2012 IZOD IndyCar Series season, it is abundantly clear who deserves the praise and who deserves the coal-raking when it comes to putting said races on the air.

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The news broke today that the IZOD IndyCar Series will bring top-level open-wheel street racing back to Texas in 2013 with the Shell and Pennzoil Grand Prix of Houston.

The race will be held on a 1.7-mile temporary course around the Reliant Park Complex with a carousel that circles the perimeter of the Astrodome. It was last held in 2007 under the auspices of the Champ Car World Series, with the 2008 event canceled just two months before the race due to the Champ Car/Indy Racing League merger.

Houston will become the second city in Texas to host INDYCAR in 2013, joining Fort Worth and the Texas Motor Speedway oval. Intriguingly, it may not be the last, as the Austin-based Circuit of the Americas, a world-class purpose-built road course that will host the penultimate Formula 1 race in 2012, has expressed interest in hosting an IZOD IndyCar Series event as well.

Should the COTA interest develop into an agreement between the track and INDYCAR, Texas would join California as the only two states to boast a "triple crown" of IndyCar competition - an oval, a natural road course, and a street circuit.

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I was all set to make this extended metaphor about the ABC coverage from St. Petersburg this weekend being like taking your brand new car to the local mechanic, then have him charge you for a $3,000 Fetzer valve or something when all he really did was sit around eating Funyons (trust me, the metaphor works if you'd just let me explain it).

But who gives a crap about that when you have stuff like this you can post instead:

(Photo credit: INDYCAR/LAT USA)

Yeah, I thought so.

Links after the jump...

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Boring. Single-file. Disappointing. Underwhelming. A poor showcase for a racing series. All of these descriptors were used in the wake of the IZOD IndyCar Series season-opening Grand Prix of St. Petersburg on Sunday.

Virtually no one used what is the most important adjective of them all: completed.

It has been almost seven months since INDYCAR has seen a race go the full distance. In that time, the series has rolled out a new chassis, new engines, new rulebooks, and new officials to run the show. The changes in the series represented a turnover of epic proportions; in effect, the "reset" button had been pressed for the series to begin 2012.

While everyone tested the new combinations as thoroughly as practicable during the off-season, there is absolutely no substitute for the only trial by fire that matters - a full race distance. So while fan and media expectations involved surprises in qualifying and race order, new faces at the top of the pecking order, and a complete overhaul of INDYCAR's narrative, the competitors themselves were concerned with only one thing: the checkered flag.

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By now, if you have visited this site more than once you know that I have this thing for writing (whether it's a good or bad thing obviously depends on your opinion of my mad skillz).

What you may not know is that I am also a graphic designer, and until recently designing race car paint schemes was one way I was keeping my family fed. In fact, I have been designing paint schemes for twenty years now - so I tend to be a bit, well, effusive about the subject.

In other words, I'm a total livery snob, and when I see one I don't like and say, "I could do better," I mean that very, very literally.

As the IZOD IndyCar Series prepares to kick off the 2012 racing season, we're beginning to see the results of a long off-season's work by INDYCAR's teams in developing their on-track brand. After the jump, I'll let you know which ones hit the slam dunk, and which ones bricked it off the rim.

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On what is going to be a poignant weekend of memories and tributes to Dan Wheldon in St. Petersburg, Florida, one person will not be around to participate: Susie Wheldon, Dan's widow.

A family spokesperson told Jenna Fryer of the Associated Press that Susie has elected to leave St. Pete for the duration of the IZOD IndyCar Series race weekend, only a couple of weeks after having presided over the dedication of a memorial to her late husband in what is Turn 10 of the temporary St. Petersburg street course.

Anyone who has suffered through the death of a loved one knows the crushing grief and sadness that accompanies the event - as well as the picking at the slowly-healing scabs that occurs when even the best-intentioned well-wishers offer condolences days, weeks, months, even years after the fact.

Magnified under the hyperfocused lens of celebrity, however, these moments of renewed sorrow become torturous, oppressive. The greater the celebrity and the more profuse the tributes, the more agonizing it becomes for the departed's family. No matter how well-meaning, the endless reopening of the wounds represents a serious roadblock to healing and moving on.

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If there's one thing the Delta Wing has taught us, it's that even those people who don't know anything about racing sure love something new and unexpected.

It is equally certain that if there were two dozen Delta Wings racing around every couple of weeks for a year, those same people would get tired of them really quickly and move on to something else.

That speaks to many quirks of the human mental state, most especially to the attention deficit our modern society and media have created in the general populace.

But that fickleness doesn't have to be prejudicial - in fact, it may be something that INDYCAR can leverage to finally get themselves back into the collective consciousness.

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I was all set to write a season preview for the 2012 IZOD IndyCar Series season - until I put together the Pulse links for this week and found that there were no less than SIX of them already in the hopper from the blogosphere.

You could argue that this phenomenon could make for an interesting psychological case study about the prognosticatory powers of IndyCar bloggers, but if you did I would slap you in the face with a giant salmon.

Anyway, given that my pals in the 'sphere have you covered with "LET'S GET READY TO RRRRRUUUMMMBLLLLLE," I figure I will buck the trend and advise you to just have a nice relaxing weekend playing outside while the weather is still nice and temperate, connect with your family members, do those odd jobs around the house you've been putting off OH WHAT THE HELL AM I SAYING WALL YOURSELF UP IN YOUR TV ROOM AND PISS INTO JARS RATHER THAN LEAVE THE ROOM AND POWER-SLAM NACHOS AND BEER UNTIL YOU CAN'T MOVE WITHOUT FIREHOSE-BARFING INTO THE CARPET!!! IT'S ST. PETE, MAN!!!!

But I'm not excited or anything.

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US-RACING, a Japanese-based media outlet focusing on American motorsports, has created an IndyCar photo calendar to help raise money for people affected by the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last year. A sample image can be found below:

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