What are “old cars” and “new cars”?
The term “old car” is used to refer to the cars that were used in calendar year 1996 (including the first two races of the 1997 season; see question 2.6.) These were quot;traditionalquot; Indy cars with ground-effects chassis and turbocharged engines, and were in fact the cars that were legal for competition in the Indianapolis 500 in 1995. (Since CART teams generally acquire new models and discard there old models every year, there was a large supply of the older models for the IRL teams.) These cars were used as an interim measure: the IRL announced the new-car specifications in December 1995, but some time was required to design and produce the new cars and engines. The last race for which the old cars were legal was the Las Vegas race in September 1996. The term “new car” applies to the non-ground-effects chassis and normally aspirated engines which began competition at Disney World in January 1997.
