B2/00 Indycar

The B2K/00 should have won the championship in its debut season in 2000 and stopped the Reynard-honda-firestone domination that had enabled Jimmy Vasser, Alex Zanardi (twice) and Juan Pablo Montoya to win the previous four CART Indycar drivers’ titles for Chip Ganassi Racing. Had Chip switched only chassis supplier in 2000, Montoya would surely have won his second consecutive title, the team’s fifth, and this time with a Lola. Instead, Ganassi also ditched Honda for Toyota, whose engines were powerful but lacking Honda’s reliability.

Montoya took seven poles that year, but just three wins – only finishing eight of the 20 races. Thus it was that Gil de Ferran won the title for Penske, which had ditched its woeful line-up of self-built chassis, Mercedes engines and Goodyear tyres for… Reynard-honda-firestone.

In 2001, the Penske/de Ferran/reynard combo again prevailed, although Kenny Brack in the Team Rahal Lola won twice as many races. In ’02, however, with Penske gone to the Indy Racing League, Lola importer Carl Haas saw the team he ran with Paul Newman spring to the fore once more, and Cristiano da Matta

(left) dominated the championship for Newman/ Haas in the B2/00, a logical development on the theme. In fact, Patrick Carpentier of Forsythe was the only Reynard driver in the top six in the table, as the team that would become Andretti Green Racing (and ran Paul Tracy, Dario Franchitti and Michael Andretti in ’02) switched from Reynard to Lola after just three races.

So convinced was Tracy by the Lola that, when AGR headed to the IRL for 2003 and he decided to stay put in CART/CHAMP Car with Forsythe, he urged his new employer to switch to Lola. When they acquiesced, he took seven wins and the title.

The majority of the grid had followed the same path, since Reynard had gone bankrupt in 2002. Lola was still making little development tweaks that ensured Reynard’s R02I became obsolete.

The last Reynard win came courtesy of Ryan Hunter-reay at Surfers Paradise in ’03.

By the time Lola’s B02/00 was pensioned off at the end of 2006, it had become the spec car of the category. However, series owners Kevin Kalkhoven and Gerry Forsythe switched to Panoz for ’07 – which would prove to be the series’ final year.