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There's very little in there about financials, Jay, unless you consider things like attendance, TV ratings, and third-party sponsors to be insignificant financial details.
Those three factors are the lifeblood of any sport in this day and age. The sad fact is that image is more important than substance in this atmosphere, and CART's image is of a series with no history, no indentity, and few obvious selling points. Now, if you dig beneath the surface, you find the series that we here love. But who's going to take the time to do that when Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon and Dale Jr. are getting roughly 60 to 80 hours of airtime a week?
CART can't become NASCAR, nor should it. But it has to play ball to a certain extent if it's going to survive at all. It's in such trouble because it looked down it's nose at the rest of American motorsport for years (especially under that w*nker Andrew Craig). It felt it need only produce good events, and the rest would take care of itself. Meanwhile NASCAR built up it's image through a lot of hard work on and off the track... Making it's drivers, simple good 'ol boys they are, into household names. And now it's paying huge dividends.
CART will have to go through a similar process if it's ever to recover. It needs to go private, _without_ a bunch of Euro-snobs running the show (see the aforementioned Mr. Craig, Joe Heitzler, and the current Chris Pook, who we can now conclusively say has _not_ done the job he was hired to do, as the series has sagged even further since he took up his post).
CART needs to get back to it's roots, plain and simple. If that means hiring a couple guys who've never been to Rio or Paris, who can't speak half a dozen languages fluently, and might occaisonally chuck their helmet at another guy's car, so be it. The money here's in beer and pretzels, not whine & cheesecake.
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