One final act was required on Sunday. At approximately 12:00 p.m., a press conference would be held to break the news that the Firestone Firehawk 600 would be postponed for an undefined date, to give the series and its partners time to tweak its TMS formula and return to race at lower speeds.

And don’t believe for a moment that peace and love was found between the warring factions on the way to the rostrum. Or, more accurately, the rostrums.

Robin Miller: The way CART handled it with Jabbering Joe Heitzler was comical. Jabbering Joe had a press conference and he wanted (TMS president Eddie) Gossage to come in with him. Gossage says, “I’m having my own press conference.”

Mike Zizzo: When we decided that we’re not going to hold the race, we had to get together on both sides, come up with our strategy, a little crisis management in terms of your press conference on who’s going to be our speakers and such. I went to the TMS side and said, “Hey, does Eddie want to join us? We need a united front here and we’ll have a press conference and we’ll work on messaging to make sure that we’re all aligned on what we’re going to say about the event, etc.” They come back to me and Eddie told me, “No, we’re going to have two separate press conferences.” And I was like, “Well, I don’t think that’s the way, you know, we should go…”

And he says, “Well, that’s the way I want to go.” And I said, “Well, OK.” And of course I said, “Well, since you’re the host, Eddie, you can go first.” The reason for that was that I wanted to hear what he said before we had to go on and do our press conference. And he said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, you’re the guest. You get to go first.”

It was his facility, it was his race weekend, so we went first and just had Dr. Olvey explain about the large amount of G forces. If I recall correctly, I think it was a 23-second lap and they had sustained G forces each lap for like 18 of the 23 seconds. You basically needed a G suit to race.

In front of their partisan congregations, Gossage vented and CART faced the music. Despite shouldering most of the blame, the series would later thank one of racing’s most famous surnames for cultivating goodwill among some influential reporters in attendance.

Mike Zizzo: We had our press conference and I had to recruit drivers to join us. I had, and still do have a ton of respect for Michael Andretti. I said, “Michael, can you please do this press conference?” I said, “The Andretti name…and you’re one of our biggest stars.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t know.” He didn’t want to get in the middle of it and I don’t blame him, but I pleaded with him because I said, “It’s so important to the series that we put you out front.” He was gracious enough to do it and help out CART at that time.

Robin Miller: CART, in USA Today, the Indy Star, and some big newspapers, they were heroes because they put driver safety first. Other than Eddie Gossage going off on them, they got fabulous coverage for taking care of the drivers.

In what’s been described as feeling like a death notice had been delivered, tens of thousands of fans were informed the race would not be held. It went over like a proverbial fart in church.

Dr. Steven Olvey: The people in the stands, of course, they went nuts, called all our drivers sissies and babies and all that kind of thing.

Race ticket holders weren’t interested in the explanations for the abrupt cancellation. Phil Sedgwick/Motorsport Images

Mike Zizzo: There were fans screaming at drivers and calling them cowards. We’re getting booed and stuff thrown on us when we’re leaving, and there were tons of people still coming into the track for the race.

As hostilities grew, one pit crew member recalls receiving explicit instructions to swiftly exit as a sizable number of fans vented their frustrations.

“It was really sobering on race day,” he said. “We weren’t sure what was going to happen. After the race was cancelled with 60,000-something fans there waiting for a show, our team manager told us to go change out of our team gear, put on our street clothes; the most Joe Normal things we had to blend in with the fans, take off any parking passes on the car and anything that might I.D. us as members of a racing team, and get out of there as fast as we could in case it went bad.”