Motor Racing: Cart Championship Facing Bankrupty

The Cart championship, once the most important motor racing series in the United States, is facing bankruptcy and the cancellation of all its events after talks to secure its future ended in deadlock yesterday.

If the series is scrapped it may have a disastrous impact in Britain, particularly on the Northampton-based Cosworth Engineering, which makes the cars' engines, and the chassis manufacturer Lola Cars in Huntingdon.

The series' board of directors has been in negotiations to sell the series to a new company called Open Wheel Racing Series, owned by a group of investors including Gerald Forsythe, for whose team Jacques Villeneuve won the 1995 Cart title, Kevin Kalkhoven and Paul Gentilozzi.

Shareholders were due to vote on the merger on December 19 but OWRS has advised Cart - Championship Auto Racing Teams - that "it believes that a number of conditions of the proposed merger" will not be satisfied by that deadline.

Lack of sponsorship and the commercial attractions of the rival Indy Racing League, centred on the Indianapolis 500, have threatened to reduce the Cart series to about 18 cars next season. OWRS has said this could be a major sticking point when it comes to finalising the sale of the series.

"This news is certainly a bit concerning," said Bernard Ferguson, the commercial director of Cosworth. "We have around 70 people working at our base in Torrance, California, preparing the engines for Cart, and it is a very important piece of business for us.

"It would have a significant impact on that workforce if the series did not continue. But we are watching all these negotiations as carefully as we can and hope that the series will be able to continue in some form or other."

Cosworth leases its V8 engines to the Cart teams for about £750,000, so even with nine teams competing this generates £6.3m of business each year for the company, which also builds formula one engines for the Jaguar, Jordan and Minardi teams.

It is a measure of the series' decline that only 11 years ago Nigel Mansell switched to Cart from formula one when he was unable to agree terms with Williams after winning the 1992 world championship. He joined the Newman Haas team, jointly owned by the actor Paul Newman and Chicago-based businessman Carl Haas, and won the title at his first attempt in 1993. His involvement boosted Cart's international profile, but since the split with the Indy Racing League at the end of 1995 the series has struggled.

Meanwhile, next year's season-ending Brazilian grand prix will go ahead in Sao Paulo on October 24 after a judge lifted a court injunction against the race which had been granted on the ground that it was a drain on the city's economy. Next season's F1 calendar will be formally ratified tomorrow week by the FIA world council.