The motorsport world was rocked to its very foundations last week when news broke that premier American open-wheel auto-racing series CrapCar has suddenly ceased to be, and no-one seemed to notice.
CrapCar and Sindy Racing, which had once been the same thing, but could never decide whether to call itself "FART" (Federal Auto Racing League) or "Sindy" (a contraction of the State of Indiana, it says here), split up in 1996, when Indianapolis Motor Speedway boss Zippy and George got all in a jingoistic huff about the series becoming dominated by darned forrin varmints, and set about creating his own oval-based series that would be so underwhelmingly dull that only Americans could possibly be interested in it.
The ploy worked, and Sindy was dominated by people called Buddy or Billy or something-or-other "Jr" for years until the title started being won by Brazilians, men from Northamptonshire, Scots with Italian names, and other people who just couldn't cut it in real motor-racing championships.
In the meantime, after a fairly shaky start, in which CrapCar's bosses thought they'd be able to compete with the legendary Sindy 500, but couldn't, FART grew to dominate open-wheel racing stateside, thanks to the unique idea of allowing the cars to turn right occasionally.
But then, with the new millenium, things started going horribly wrong. For a start, there was a string of poor management decisions and sponsorship crisises that led to share prices being slashed - a heinous thing indeed in Mammon's own country. And then the serieses's organisers let the unthinkable happen: an obnoxious frenchman won the championship four years in a row.
There was nothing for it but for CrapCar's teams to hang the sense of it and join the Sindy Racing League, which is what they've now decided to do.
On the plus side, this means we have the prospect of Danica Fitchick and Katherine LegsLEGGE, KATHERINE
 Showing a bit of chest with Katherine Legge. Katherine Legge is a racing driver from Guildford, and not from Betelgeuse as we had previously assumed. Katherine currently races in the DTM (German Touring Cars) and her website describes her as an "Audi factory driver", and she'd probably go faster if she drove a car instead. Unlike other drivers who shall remain Danica Patrick, rather than bleating on about being a driver first and a woman second, Legge has focused on being a first woman driver, second to none. As the first woman to become a BRDC "Rising Star", she followed the traditional Road to F1™ of FFord, FRenault and F3. She then took the unusual step of moving to US FRenault in 2004, but the move paid off: in 2005 she became the first woman to test an F1 car (albeit a Minardi) since Sarah Fisher, the first woman to drive an A1GP car, and the first woman to win a major open-wheel race in North America (in her debut in Formula Toyota Atlantic). She followed this in 2006 by becoming the first woman to lead a ChampCar race.
Not that it really fundamentally-speaking matters, of course. Statistically speaking, no-one in the US is interested in open-wheel racing, so no-one over there, or at least nobody worth speaking about, will care very much.
And neither, in fact, will we.
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