American Championship Car Racing

American Championship Car Racing

Since 1916 there has been a recognized United States national automobile racing National Championship for drivers of professional-level, single-seat open-wheel race cars. The championship has been under the auspices of several different sanctioning bodies since 1909. Since 1911, the Indianapolis 500-mile race has been regarded as the marquee event of the National Championship. As of 2012, the top-level American open wheel racing championship is sanctioned by IndyCar.

The open-wheeled, winged, single-seater cars have generally been similar to those in Formula One, though there are important differences. Due to the fame of the Indianapolis 500, the cars that would typically compete in U.S. Championship car racing are often called Indy Cars (or IndyCar, Indycar); these cars were popularized during the rising popularity of CART PPG Indy Car World Series racing in the early 1990s.

Famous quotes containing the words american, car and/or racing:

“We work harder than ever, and I cannot see the advantages in cooperative living.”
—Lydia Arnold, U.S. commune supervisor (of the North American Phalanx, Red Bank, New Jersey, 1843- 1855)

“Fifty years from now, it will not matter what kind of car you drove, what kind of house you lived in, how much you had in your bank account, or what your clothes looked like, But the world may be a little better because you were important in the life of a child.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in The Winning Family, by Louise Hart, ch. 1 (1987)

“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)