Giving this its own post: Revenue-sharing plan

Brian Barnhart & Terry Angstadt discussed the "flatter, wider" payout system for 2008 and beyond.

Robin Miller gives us the details of a revenue-sharing plan.
The skinny:
*-Indy purse goes to $2mm for the winner and $300k to start.
*-No other race purses besides the Indy 500.
*-Instead, $1.3mm will be given to all cars that commit to running the full season.
*-Points fund eliminated, except the $1mm bonus for the champion.

Most of the team principals seemed to be in favor:
Greg Beck, who hasn't been able to run FT since 2001 (he fielded a car for Alex Barron at a couple of early races this year): "It has the potential to get us back full-time because it provides a financial anchor and it makes it easier to go back to old sponsors when you’re already to X point. It makes it more equitable for a smaller team."

Mike Hull of TCGR: "Increasing revenue to the teams is vital to the long-term success of the series and it’s a big step forward in a series that already pays good prize money. If you know coming in you’re guaranteed $1.3 million, then a smaller team can work backwards and go out and find somebody to support the rest of the program."

Robbie Buhl of D&R: “I think it’s a good thing for the health of the series. We need to have 20-plus cars and we can’t be short-sighted – we need to be stronger."

And, of course, there's that opinionated guy who won the Indy 500 four times ... A.J. Foyt, always ready to offer the counterpoint: "I think I’d prefer to keep the purses because they’re decent. That’s how drivers get paid."

My not-so-humble opinion: This can be a great idea to guarantee some $$ to the smaller teams, and possibly allow some of the one-car operations to run more cars. It at least covers the cost of the engine lease & tires, with the I500 purse being able to cover a bit more. Obviously, this only covers about 25-30% of the budget for the smallest operations. One of the big things the IRL has lost since 2003 has been the small privateers running along with the big boys -- in part because they couldn't hack it financially once Honda/Toyota got involved & AGR/TCGR/Penske/RLR came over. But it's always good to do something to bring the privateers back -- especially as they're getting squeezed out of that to-be-nameless stock-car series. Beck sounds interested -- and tried to run a few races this year (and probably would have run some more if the $$ could have been found). PDM has posted on their website that it wants to run the full schedule by 2009. Roth wants to run two cars the full season next year.

There's a baseline, now ...

The top teams will lose purse $$ in this arrangement, but they'd like to have more teams to beat (of course), and they can usually finance their operations via the added sponsorship dollars they get from the exposure of being up front.

Economies of scale should allow teams to field more cars -- which is more palatable to TCGR: putting out 2 cars and getting $2.6mm in guaranteed money, or putting Alex Lloyd in a chassis they already have and getting $3.9 mm in guaranteed money, with a sponsor paying Lloyd's salary and the crew? The structure is already there, and teams already have a handful of Dallara tubs (heck, if Roth can end up with two, it can't be all bad).

Bring more cars back into the series ... it needs to get back to the 24-to-28-car fields it saw a decade ago. This should do that, even if it will lead to more of a financial outlay from the IRL.