It’s a terrific idea because Steve Luczo and Jay Penske are racing enthusiasts, but not experts. Having Gil de Ferran around bolsters the technical side of their team significantly; Gil also brings a wealth of practical team management experience to boot.

He’ll also be a great steadying influence on Rafa Matos, who is very skilled but still very inexperienced.

Luczo Dragon and de Ferran Motorsports are two companies that voluntarily decided to merge their operations.

Your proposal appeared – to me at least – to be a situation where the league would sit down and mandate mergers between teams, as well as “pooling” sponsorship money between teams to fund other teams.

If that is indeed what you were proposing, I am against it because I do not believe it is the series’ responsibility to dictate to teams who they should work with or to manipulate their teams’ sponsorship monies. Moreover, I sincerely doubt that the contracts teams make with their sponsors would include any verbiage that would allow said monies to be “pooled” as a league resource.

Now, if you did not mean to convey that concept as your proposal – if you meant something else – then I apologize for misinterpreting you. It could be that you were simply talking about voluntary technology sharing between teams, which has very legitimate benefits for smaller teams and has proven to be effective in many other racing series.

But if that was not the nub of your gist, so to speak, then I continue to disagree with you that this would be a good idea for the sport. Like it or not, racing teams are independent businesses and have to sink or swim on their own merits. Much as I despise seeing teams like Vision Racing searching for sponsorship and unable to take to the track, that is their battle to fight – the league might offer a financial assistance package of a sort, but it simply can’t force mergers or sponsorship pooling from other teams.

This is your original post at TrackForum:

In light of today’s developments, here is my recommendation to the Izod IndyCar Series for an immediate response.

The meeting of every team principle and potential team owner, from the group assembled last week in Indianapolis, should be reconvened.

Every owner who has signed an associate sponsor, but lacks full funding for participation in the Series, must instead form a partnership to pool their resources.

Investments guaranteed toward the efforts of principles such as De Ferran, Bachelart, Rahal, and others must be devoted to the resumption of operations at Vision Racing.

Vision racing will be operated as a two car team for Ed Carpenter and Graham Rahal.

If Dale Coyne Racing is unable to fully fund the participation of the Boy Scouts of America car, that endorsement should be immediately transferred to Vision Racing.

Fielding the Boy Scouts car for full 2010 participation is essential. Fielding Graham Rahal, one of Izod’s new “Stars”, is essential. Ed Carpenter must share his rightful position as the core of Vision Racing, and contribute his presence to the face of IndyCar racing that we show the world.

There is blindness in allowing the scattered resources of potential owners to be left unrealized. There must be a concerted effort to restore Vision Racing, in the manner I have described…and present it for all the world to see.

This is my response:

I think this is absolutely unnecessary.

I’m gutted for the folks at Vision, but the idea of turning the team into a welfare situation has me scratching my head.

Where, indeed, was the outcry for welfare when Kelley Racing was struggling to find sponsorship? Eventually, they sold out to Tony George and TG used the assets to establish Vision.

This is simply business – the more we accept that fact and the less we treat it like the apocalypse, the better off we’ll all be.

I’d much rather the effort be expended to make IndyCar racing more innovative and less rules-restrictive than to go all-out to save one race team – much as I like the people employed by it.

NOWHERE did I call your initiative “foolish.” As for my “inherent mistrust,” I don’t even know what that means. Trust has nothing to do with this – you posted, I responded, and there simply was no intention on my part to make you look foolish.

If Conquest, Coyne and Vision get together and pool resources, terrific – but it’s not, as you said in your original post, something they “must” do. It falls to the principals themselves to take the initiative to do it on their own. A voluntary merger would indeed make all of the teams stronger, but I have not seen or heard of any indication that any of these principals want to merge their assets with other teams.

I hope that clarifies things, but this is absolutely the wrong forum for this discussion. Please e-mail me if you have any further issues with this topic; I would rather keep these comments focused on the article’s topic.

By the way, I agree with you about the DeltaWing consortium’s position – they do seem to give off the vibe that they want to mandate change – and control the mechanism thereof on their own instead of leaving it to the league – instead of simply being another option. That makes me hesitant to support the concept, which in theory is otherwise very innovative.

Actually, if you have a personal remembrance of Joe Stimola I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with our readers. You can click “New FanPost” in the right hand column of the site and create a story complete with pictures and whatever else. When you’re done I’ll proof it and publish it on the front page.