A few years ago Tony George, the owner and Chairman of the Board at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, decided to break from his long-standing relationship with CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) and create his own stand alone racing series. Such was formed the Indy Racing League or as it's known today as simply the IRL. Although many outsiders thought he had purely lost his mind, Tony had a vision of an open-wheeled oval series that would both reduce the skyrocketing cost of the competitors and also even the playing field somewhat to create a more competitive series. Not too many individuals or businessmen have the foresight, the resources and the pure audaciousness to discard a formula that had worked so well for many years. But when you are a majority owner of the most famous racing circuit in the world; you can take a few liberties. Regardless of your position, the proof is there for all to see. The IRL is alive growing and CART died a slow and painful death. Even though both entities in this battle to the death had their ideologies to defend and rightly so, the competition is what eventually won the trophy.

Now that I've painted myself into a corner and opened up a can of worms that may take months to put the lid back on, I'll get to the point of the story. Around the same time that the IRL was starting to emerge as a legitimate series, John Bodin and Thomas Heineman had opened the source-code from Hasbro's Nascar Heat to create what was then know as IRL-Heat. The IRL-Heat Mod was a valid project that hopefully would fill a long-standing void in Simulation Racing for open-wheeled-Indy Car fans. Their project was the first of its kind since the days of Indy Car Racing II by Papyrus, circa 1995. Fans were ecstatic that there would again be Indy Car racing on the PC. IRL-Heat was built on a solid, proven platform with accurate car shapes, realistic physics, competitive AI drivers and a dependable Multiplayer code. About all these guys needed was a little more time to fine tune some of the details and this would have been a pure open-wheeled racing simulation born solely from the desire to create a title unlike any before it. Unfortunately, they received a cease and desist order from none other than the IRL office threatening a lawsuit if they continued. As fate would have it, Tony had already made a deal with the devil (read: Codemasters) by contracting with them to build "Indy Racing Series". I'm left to assume that Tony must have put his Brain in a Jar and left it on the shelf somewhere. This project
(IRL-Heat) did continue on under the name of the All-American Open Wheel Racing but after the severe blow dealt by the action of the IRL, the fire that had once driven the endeavor was snuffed out in an instant by corporate greed.

Although this review started in a rather unusual manor, it's important to know where we've been in order to know where we are going. It's not the design of this review to bash the reputation of Codemasters because they have been quite good to our business and the industry. They continue to listen to our suggestions and improve on their product, which is more than I can say for the majority of publishers. I'm also certain they had no part in the demise of the IRL-Heat project. They innocently won the bid to publish the Indy Car Series title. It is however my opinion that the IRL-Heat project was prematurely terminated without an honest evaluation of the validity of the project and what it could have become.

Having digested the assessment above I need to profess that I actually enjoyed racing the Indy Car Series title because the cars are actually fun to drive. As a lover of motor sports, that is what it's all about in the end. Like I stated earlier, when you have the most famous race circuit in the world at your disposal, you can take a few liberties. Yet after a few trips to the track and then back to the garage, I discovered that this game had some flaws in it and there were more that I hadn't seen in my initial trial run.