The days when Indy racers - Foyt, Andretti, the Unsers, Rahal - were household names are long gone. I bet the average sports fan couldn’t name anyone from the Champ series, and practically no one from the Indy series except maybe Danica. NASCAR has put both open wheel series about two laps down, and they have a hell of a pit to climb out of.
I think the Indy 500 will be a good bellwether for where it’s going to go. Heck, they out to get Michael Andretti and a few of the others out of retirement just to generate some interest (especially since Mario was a driving force behind this).
I think it had much less to do with Nascar than with Tony George. The IRL was a joke for years. IRL Championship meant nothing, since the drivers were nobody’s or 3rd tier drivers that defected from CART. And even the 500 was a joke. Now CHAMP is in that position. IRL still isn’t what CART was, and CHAMP is irrelevant. It’s only been the last couple years that I’ve been able to sit through an IRL race, and I haven’t watched the other series in years.