It's hard to believe that the calendar has already turned to the second week of 2006 source: champcarworldseries.com - John Oreovicz But it's even harder to fathom that another three full months will pass before the drivers and machines of the Champ Car World Series hit the streets of Long Beach in anger. It's the second year in a row that Champ Car fans have had to wait until April to see their heroes in action, a far cry from the formative days of the sport, when a 183-mile road race near San Diego heralded the start of the AAA-sanctioned racing season on January 1, 1913... In trying to conjure up some story ideas to fill the next 90-odd days, I started thinking about the Champ Car schedule and how it evolved into its current pattern of running from April to November. Of course, a lot is dictated by the need to run in reasonably warm temperatures. But I'm surprised that more thought hasn't been put into running an event or two during an unconventional time of the year. While the earliest Champ Car races from 1909 onward were predominantly road races, the brick track known as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway soon became the main fixture on the schedule. Into the twenties, board tracks took over as the preferred venues for the series and at the height of the board track era, Frank Lockhart, Peter DePaolo and Earl Cooper fought it out over 26 rounds in 1926. But by 1932, the board tracks were gone, leaving Indianapolis and a handful of dirt ovals as the basis of the AAA Championship. As war broke out in Europe, only three races were staged yearly from 1937-41 (just two in 1938) before competition ceased altogether from 1942-45 due to World War II. The schedule began to round into its current form in the ten post-war years of AAA-sanction. By the mid-fifties, the 12-race slate usually kicked off with the Indianapolis 500 and included only one other paved oval race (at the Milwaukee Mile) and a slew of dirt ovals like Sacramento, Springfield and DuQuoin. From 1947 to 1955 and 1965-69, the legendary Pikes Peak hillclimb was a points-paying round of the AAA and later United States Auto Club National Championship and 1965 heralded the advent of road racing to the USAC Championship Trail. The complete article at champcarworldseries.com
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