Government and media Oz’s have been telling us for the past five weeks that our world will never be the same since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Brock Yates, an automotive writer who has always been willing to offer opinions which challenge the conventional wisdom, is telling us that the world of auto racing will not be exempt.

Writing for speedvision.com, Yates is predicting that the money wells of corporate sponsors could soon dry up.

He foresees the possibility of a year of relative economic chaos around the world. That, he says, would lead to the disappearance of corporate sponsorships as the big, international firms face the choice of laying off employees or cutting back in other areas of spending.

Yates is calling for the powers-that-be in motorsports, namely organizations, like CART and NASCAR, to start, or be ready to start to abandon the technological contest that major league racing has become.

Specifically, he applauds CART’s announcement last weekend that it will abandon turbocharged engines. He goes further, suggesting that CART’s formula be allowed to include production based pushrod engines, and designs which do not use the engine as part of the chassis. All of this would reduce costs.

For NASCAR, Yates said that the future of the sport would be a return to truly stock body shapes … shapes which actually differ from each other, instead of the current state of affairs in which the only real difference fans can see are the stick-on grills.

But Yates undermines his whole argument when he goes so far as to decry the use of million dollar transporters and motor homes for teams in the major circuits. He points out that no such frills were necessary in the golden days of Holman-Moody, the Wood Brothers and Junior Johnson.

No way Brock. If you see a retrenchment back to the mid-60’s in all aspects of motorsports, if not society in general, as being necessarily intertwined, you may not be realistic.

It’s human nature. You cannot “keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree.”

We in the western world have an immense ability to transform things, from electricity to cable television, which come to us as luxuries, quickly into necessities … or even inalienable rights.