Class of ’99: Triumph and Tragedy in the 1999 Indy Car Series
by John Oreovicz
As Dr. Gordon S. Wood, professor emeritus of History at Brown University, suggests: “As Yogi Berra might put it, it is difficult to write history, especially about the past.” Wise words.
I read this book on a whim, which has less to do with the quality of the author and more with the topic. Life is short, and Indy Car and CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) are just no longer high on my reading, let alone review list.
But that particular year, 1999, sparked my memory. Indeed, early on in the book, Oreovicz writes “[1999] turned out to be, in my opinion, the most compelling single season in the history of Indy car racing.” But what exactly does he mean by “the history of Indy car racing”? CART? USAC? The AAA (America Automobile Association)? The Champ Car World Series? Indy Racing League/INDYCAR? This is just the sort of question that encapsulates the murkiness that makes writing about the past, this particular past, difficult. There are probably other seasons that were far more fascinating, interesting, decisive, important but Oreovicz singling out the word “compelling” turns out to be just right.
The 1999 season of CART came two decades after launching its on-track confrontation with the United States Auto Club (USAC). About the 1979 season, the idea of “Indy car racing” seems to have entered the motorsport lexicon. It was the CART PPG Indy Car World Series that muscled USAC out of its way by 1982. In 1994, Tony George, part of the family that owned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, created the “Indy Racing League” (IRL) as a counterpoint to the CART series, the two organizations creating two separate, competing “Indy car” series beginning with the 1996 season. However, only the IRL competed at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), with the IMS forcing CART to drop the use of “Indy Car” (or IndyCar) beginning with the 1997 season.
So, 1999. Now renamed the CART FedEx Championship Series, “Champ Cars” had replaced “Indy Cars” as the branding for the series. CART became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, the Indy Racing League was being bankrolled by the IMS. Both CART and IRL were, to be kind, limping along. It was now difficult to remember exactly why the Formula 1 gurus had been so very concerned with the impact of the CART series only a handful of years beforehand when Nigel Mansell switched to the series from F1 and then Jacques Villeneuve left to compete in F1.
Keep in mind that this book is part biography (of a racing season) and part memoir (by Oreovicz of his role in it). For the 1999 CART season, he was back inside the media circus covering it. He had spent the previous two seasons with PacWest Racing Group as its PR contact. As Oreovicz informs us: “From the time I started attending the Indianapolis 500 in the late 1970s, it was the people—not the politics—that drove my interest in Indy car racing. Unfortunately, from the moment I started working professionally in the sport in 1993, politics were the dominant story.” This is, perhaps, too different a path trod elsewhere by Denis S. Jenkinson (DSJ), except his interest was generally the cars, meaning things mechanical and technical, while also having some interest in some of the people. Jenkinson and Oreovicz share an utter disdain for “racing politics,” both dismissing the subject in no uncertain terms. There is little doubt in my mind, after reading thousands of pages written by DSJ in Motor Sport, that he would wholeheartedly agree with Oreovicz about the respective lack of leadership in both the IRL and CART that would destroy Indy car racing during the 1990s.
Oreovicz is a good journalist, and he can weave together an interesting and well-written narrative. At the center (or centre, if you will) of this narrative is the Martyr of 1999, Greg Moore, the paladin from British Columbia. As Oreovicz makes clear several times, it is his belief that it was Moore who could possibly have saved CART from itself. Maybe yes, maybe no, but Moore’s influence is one of the themes that resonates in Class of ’99 time and again.
Further complications arose as the series moved to Japan and then to Long Beach and then to _etcetera_ but Oreovicz handles these topics with aplomb, and, really, better than most. Anyone looking for a detailed rundown of each event and box scores, will need to look elsewhere. This is not that book. Oreovicz focuses on the story of the overarching flow of that one season, with Greg Moore often being at its center
A worthy addition to the bookshelf.
Copyright 2025, H. Donald Capps (speedreaders.info).
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