Losing Credibility; With its new engine formula, CART might have dealt itself the fatal blow.

At a meeting before the Houston race, Championship Auto Racing Teams' franchise board (its team owners) approved a copy of the IRL's 3.5-liter normally aspirated V8 for the start of the 2003 season. Result? Instead of retaining its three current engine manufacturers, the series has lost two more. With the announcement, CART officially has no engine suppliers after next season.

With that CART turned a plan that has been on the table for at least nine months into a knee-jerk response. CART executives insist it's nothing of the kind, but if it were anything else, wouldn't there be specifics?

It's presumably an IRL engine because at this point we don't really know. CART identified ``a normally aspirated V8, up to 3.5 liters.'' Will it have a rev-limiter, specified block dimensions or restrictions on materials or electronic controls? CART needs another ``30 to 60 days'' to decide.

``There will be commonality, with sophistication,'' said John Lopes, CART's new senior vice president of racing operations. ``Our teams came to us and said `We want to be in CART and we want to be in the Indy 500.' We have to take their costs into consideration. We are looking to [Formula One] for a little bit of input, and the other open-wheel series as well.''

That's another 30 to 60 days to settle specifics on an engine that should be track testing in a year. It seems all the more incredible because CART first indicated to its engine manufacturers it would adopt an IRL-style engine last March; because Ford and Honda have repeated since May that it's too late for them to do anything before 2004.

The credibility deficit lies not in the new formula, vague as it is, but in the process that produced it. In April, after CART's own deadline for establishing a new formula had passed, Toyota announced it was building an engine for the Indy 500 and IRL in 2003. It left open the possibility of continued participation in CART. Six months later and exactly one week before CART finally approved a new engine, Toyota said it was leaving CART after 2002.

Nonetheless, CART CEO Joe Heitzler insisted there was no connection between Toyota's decision and CART's.