The Dumbest Race in CART History - 2002 Surfers Paradise

I'm just going to go on the record and say that I hated the 2002 CART Season

Team Penske was gone. Honda and Toyota were on their way out. Traction control was added. ESPN was IRL only and took Paul Page with them (SPEED had great on-air talent, but the production quality was poor). The schedule sucked. The racing product sucked. But the worst thing about the 2002 season - mandatory pit windows

After Max Papis absolutely waxed the field on strategy at Laguna Seca 2001, the powers that be decided to make fuel strategy races impossible. The result was mandating pit windows that drivers/teams had to adhere to

Into the final portion of the season, Cristiano da Matta already had the title wrapped up. A torrential downpour hit Surfers Paradise, and the series did not want to delay the race as Fontana was the next weekend and it was a tight window to get all the teams / equipment home in time to set up for the next race

Now, I don't want my feelings about this race to diminish the start of this race, where a horrible accident resulted in the injuries of Adrian Fernandez and Tora Takagi. It was a horrendous crash and I am very glad everyone was okay

The start crash would kick-off just a weird day. The officials would throw the green flag for about 11 minutes before going back to yellow due to poor track conditions

Rather than red flagging the race, the cars would circulate the remainder of the race under yellow. Officials did not communicate an official lap count to teams until the latter stages, and with these stupid mandatory pit windows, teams were having to pit for full service even though they didn't need fuel

This meant race control could literally just pick the winner, and they opted to pick a lap that gave the undeserving Mario Dominguez the win, one of the most fraudulent wins in the history books

This race was another stain on what had been a disastrous couple of years for CART

𝕏 https://x.com/Hickey93

Timestamps
0:00 Start
1:12 Replay of start crash
1:20 Green flag
12:47 Yellow flag
13:23 Servia fire
13:49 Pit windows
15:26 Kim Green not happy
16:27 da Matta spins
17:55 Kim Green not happy again
19:54 Dominguez wins
21:42 Debrief from Fontana

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Video credit - SPEED