War Stories: A Firestone Legend Recalls the Unforgettable and Tragic 1999 CART Indy-Car Season

No matter how much racing you watch and how closely you follow it, no matter how many books or articles or historical retrospectives you read or how up to date you stay with your social feeds, there are always stories and anecdotes to unearth about times and things you thought you knew much about.

Even as someone who’s been fortunate enough to have spent many years of my journalism/editorial career involved in covering professional motorsports, it’s always fascinating to meet and talk to new people and listen to their tales—people like Dale Harrigle.

Today, the 55-year-old Pennsylvania native is chief engineer, tire development of consumer replacement at Bridgestone Americas, overseeing and working on production car rubber. But for 22 years beginning in 1994, he was an integral and well-known figure within Firestone’s Indy-car racing program and America’s top-level open-wheel paddocks. Along the way, he rose from working on the effort’s early development days to become its chief engineer responsible for development as the company supplied rubber to teams competing in both the CART Indy Car (later Champ Car) World Series and the Indy Racing League.

I spent a little time with Harrigle at summer’s end, during IndyCar’s 2025 finale at Nashville Superspeedway that happened to fall just a few weeks after the 125th anniversary of the company’s founding. We chatted like a couple of typical car nerds about Firestone’s commitment to the series and fun factoids like how it, as IndyCar’s sole supplier (as well as doing the same for the Indy NXT feeder series), makes approximately 30,000 IndyCar tires in Akron, Ohio, for each season. (They’re all mounted, balanced, and stored in a Walmart-sized facility in Indianapolis and delivered to the teams ready to go, save for adjustments to the dry nitrogen gas pressures they’re inflated to.)

See All 12 Photos12

He explained how the road-car side takes learnings from the racing department as much as is practically viable, such as sharing a type of machine used in the production process for each. And how the ultra-high-performance Firehawk Indy 500 street tire will be updated soon, as well as the fact the Firehawk AS V2 high-performance all-season version’s tread pattern is based on the one employed for IndyCar’s rain tire. On the business and marketing side, it’s worth noting the company says 8 percent of customers who have ever used one of its Firestone Complete Auto Care centers also watch IndyCar racing. That’s a fair number of people when you consider those establishments serve millions of folks per year.

Regardless, if you haven’t spent much time around engineers, know that even the most affable of them tend to be a reserved bunch when it comes to talking about themselves, their accomplishments, and experiences. Typically, if you don’t ask targeted questions, they won’t tell. Then a few weeks ago, longtime IndyCar journalist John Oreovicz’s new book, Class of ’99: Triumph and Tragedy in the 1999 CART Indy Car Series, landed in my hands.

If you followed the CART series back then, you already know why that season was memorable and worthy of a book devoted to it. If you didn’t but have an interest in IndyCar and American racing history, I can’t recommend it enough. The cars of the era, at the height of the CART vs. Indy Racing League civil war that rocked the sport, were turbocharged V-8 beasts pushing 900-plus horsepower, with multiple chassis and engine manufacturers, and a tire war between Firestone and Goodyear. The enticing driver pool included a diverse and desirable mix of accomplished, famed veterans and young guns who would go on to become all-timers themselves. Horrifyingly, the deaths of rookie Gonzalo Rodríguez at Laguna Seca that September and Canadian star Greg Moore just more than a month later in the season finale at California Speedway put the blackest of clouds over the full affair.

See All 12 Photos12

As Oreovicz deftly examines in Class of ’99: “The sport lost its brightest young star. No one person was capable of saving Indy-car racing from destroying itself, but if anyone stood a chance, it was Moore. He was just 24 years old when he died, and already he had captivated a legion of fans and conquered the world-class drivers he fought against on the track.

“Moore’s loss was the dark punctuation mark on a remarkable year. The 1999 CART championship battle came down to the wire, and the young drivers who emerged as front-runners that year proved to be one of the most talented groups in race history. That remarkable title clash [in the end between Dario Franchitti and Juan Pablo Montoya]—and its tragic conclusion—was just one of many storylines during what was arguably the most compelling single season of competition in the 100-year history of American open-wheel championship racing.”

As I read the book and my own memories of ’99 came back into focus—I simply followed it as a young fan at the time, as I was still three years away from working in this business—I thought of Harrigle and how he was smack in the thick of it all. So, I rang him to ask about his firsthand experiences and recollections of that season and era.

MotorTrend: It’s been 26 years, so people probably don’t ask you about 1999 much these days. Have you read Class of ’99 yet?

Dale Harrigle: I have been reading it, yeah. It brings back a lot of memories, and there’s a lot of great memories of the competition against Goodyear. There’s one thing I think that comes across in the book that struck me: Back then, the teams were, I’ll almost say a little bit more like families. It was a very closeknit community. It still is a closeknit community to this day, but for example, I knew Alex Zanardi, I worked with him constantly. He helped us develop our street- and road-course tires. I had a lot of fun with Alex and [his Chip Ganassi Racing engineer] Morris Nunn, who both play a pivotal role in the book.

See All 12 Photos12

Laguna Seca, 1996: Jimmy Vasser (driver on left) celebrated winning the championship, while Alex Zanardi (driver on right) claimed Rookie of the Year honors. Dale Harrigle is standing in the back row, his head blocking the F on the Firestone signage.

MT: If people don’t know, Zanardi was a monster driving those cars and a hell of a character.

DH: I remember one time at Firebird East [Raceway] outside Phoenix; we were there for a three-day street-course test. And back then the cars weren’t as mechanically reliable as they are today. So I think the team was changing an engine or something, so they had some down time. And I happened to walk into the trailer to talk to Alex, and Alex and Morris Nunn are sitting in the engineering office in the front of the trailer. I think Morris had bought a Ferrari at the time, an old one, and he was trying to do some maintenance or some work to it. And Alex has a Ferrari shop manual, and he’s attempting to translate it from Italian to English so Morris could work on his car. And it was quite an entertaining conversation. The way they’re portrayed in the book was really how they were in real life. I mean, I never met anyone as happy to be alive as Alex Zanardi was and still is. And that’s the way he came across in private and in public. He was just a fascinating guy to work with.

MT: What was it like from your side to be involved in a tire war? That’s something IndyCar hasn’t had in years; in fact, ’99 was the last season when more than one tire company was involved.

DH: It was the competition. I mean, Firestone has always been focused on safety, durability, and reliability. That was our focus even in the early days. One of the ways I think we won a lot of races early on was, our tires were simply more consistent than Goodyear’s over a long run, which led to two things. One, obviously it helped us at the end of a fuel stint. And I think some of our teams were maybe not quite as established as some of the Goodyear teams. So, having that consistent tire meant they could get more practice in. They could do more practice, they could get more reliable data over a day.

You put a new set on, a new set’s always going to be faster, but you could still gain valuable insight from the car, even with 20 laps on a set or something like that. But from our perspective, it was really the competition aspect. We had a tremendous amount of respect for the engineers from Goodyear; they had been doing it a very long time, and we came in with the idea that we were just going to have to flat-out engineer a better product than they had. And we didn’t really deviate from that. But the idea of when you won, when you beat Goodyear ... when at Loudon, New Hampshire [in 1995], when André Ribeiro passed Michael Andretti on the outside of Turn 1 to take the lead and to ultimately to take [our first] win, I mean, we knew we had accomplished something at that point because we had beat some of the best people in the world at it.

See All 12 Photos12

On the grid in Loudon, New Hampshire, with André Ribeiro’s car in 1995.

MT: How much trash talking did the tire engineers engage in with each other?

DH: Right, yeah. There’s a level of competition there, and we kept it friendly. But we had some fun with each other at times. Goodyear’s PR person at the time was Michael Crawford. Michael had a great personality, and we had some fun poking Michael every now and then. So yeah, there was a little bit of that kind of back and forth. And let’s face it; Akron [in Ohio, where Firestone and Goodyear both have a large presence] is a relatively small town. I won’t say we all knew each other, but working in the industry, it’s a relatively small population of people that do this kind of thing.

MT: How long did it take you guys to really reach the top of your game?

DH: We won two races in ’95, the Michigan 500 and Loudon. And then in ’96 we won 10 races. In ’97, we won 13 [of the 17 races.] And by ’99 we were the preferred tire. And ultimately at the end of the ’99 season is when Goodyear chose to get out of IndyCar racing.

See All 12 Photos12

The front row for the 1996 Michigan 500. Drivers from top: Moore, Zanardi, and Vasser. Harrigle is second from left in the back row.

MT: This may be difficult to talk about, but Greg Moore: He was only a year or so older than me, and he was my favorite IndyCar driver before I became a journalist who isn’t supposed to have favorites. Not only was he mega-talented and fun to watch, but it seems everyone who knew him says he was just a great person. Did you have much of a relationship with him?

DH: I did. Yeah, I did. I worked with Players Forsythe Racing for a number of years, so I worked directly with Greg. I was their tire engineer. I knew Ric Moore, Greg’s dad.

You have to remember that back in these days, we didn’t have the data-acquisition technology we have today. We used stopwatches; we used to time the cars with stopwatches. And when I was assigned to Greg with the Players Forsythe team, I would time him with a stopwatch, and I was an easy source of lap time [info]. So, Ric Moore would basically, he would check the lap time as I wrote it down, and then he would do a lap of his own of the pits because he paced around during every race. And then he would kind of come back to me at the next lap and check the lap time. So yeah, a bit of a personal note, but to tell you the depth of what I mentioned about how it was like a family: My oldest son, who was born in 2003, is named Greg in honor of Greg Moore.

See All 12 Photos12

Harrigle with Moore in Cleveland in 1999.

MT: I had no idea. Is there a particular memory that comes to mind when you think about him?

DH: The one story ... Yeah. Earlier in ’99. My wife and I were into scuba diving, and I was telling Greg about it. We were in Surfers Paradise in Australia for the race, and I was telling him about how we were scuba diving and we were 60 feet down in Hawaii. And Greg kind of looks at me and goes, “Isn’t that dangerous?” And Steve Challis, his engineer, turns around and says to me, “Dale, don’t say it. Don’t say a word.”

MT: laughs

DH: I was like, wait, what? So, it’s all relative. Greg, he was just a great guy. He was really good with the fans. He was really good with the people around him. The team was like a family. It seems hard to believe these days, but back then I actually had a chance to drive two Champ Cars. PacWest had a media day where we got to drive the PacWest car, and then Players Forsythe did the same thing in a parking lot at Firebird West. They set up a cone course, and all the mechanics and me, and I think maybe one or two of the Mercedes engine guys, got a chance to drive the actual race car around this little cone course. And Greg was there, and that was a great time. That was just an unbelievable day, as you can imagine. So much fun.

MT: I’ll bet. As an engineer, you had access to data and information fans and media didn’t. How do you rank Greg in terms of talent and ability and potential versus other drivers you worked with? He was signed to Team Penske for the 2000 season and people expected he would win lots of races there, the Indy 500, championships ...

DH: From a raw driving perspective, he was very, very good. He’s somewhere between a Hélio Castroneves and a Juan Pablo Montoya from a driving perspective. He was not as, I’ll say, focused on the setup of the car as some. Like, Zanardi was very focused on what the car was doing mechanically. Another guy that was really good at the car from a mechanical perspective is Tony Kanaan. Greg was more of a—he drove the car to the absolute limit of what it could provide.

MT: Was it more of a seat-of-the-pants-feel type of approach?

DH: Yeah, it was more of a seat-of-the-pants feel. But he was phenomenally good on ovals. And Oreovicz talks in his book about how there was this transition from the older guard to the younger guard. I think he talks about how Jimmy Vasser was like, I keep a comfortable amount of understeer in the car so that I’m comfortable, I’m safe, I know what’s going to happen. And some of the younger guys at the time, like Hélio and Greg and Kanaan, they didn’t have that safe level of understeer. They drove the car for everything they could get out of it.

MT: I remember seeing Montoya, he was a rookie, and it may have been the season opener on the Homestead-Miami oval, but in any case, he was somehow driving his car sideways. I had never seen someone drive an Indy car like that on an oval ...

DH: Yeah. Yes. Montoya had the fastest hands of anyone we had ever seen. I mean, he was able to get the car loose and just keep it there and control it.

MT: Pato O’Ward has a reputation like that today.

DH: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, I follow it as a fan now. I don’t kind of have the inside story that I used to. But yeah, I mean, I think some of the guys right now are super talented, as well.

MT: Speaking of then and now, you mentioned before about having less data available compared to today. How big of a difference was it? We’re talking about the late ’90s, not the ’70s, so there was certainly some level of computing power and reasonable data available, no?

DH: It was nowhere near what it is today. And in fact, it was an interesting time also because not only did you have younger drivers in a change of guard [sort of scenario], also the engineers were very much kind of that same thing. So, you’d have a Morris Nunn, who when we practiced for example at the Firebird street course I mentioned, he would literally get out of the timing stand and walk to various areas and watch the car through the corners. He felt that he could learn something from watching the car. Whereas you’d have some of the younger guys like a Julian Robertson [at Chip Ganassi Racing] now, who would basically just set the car up from the data and the driver feedback.

MT: All right, not to put you on the spot, but there are all these exceptional drivers you worked with and competed against. If I force you to pick one as being the best of the best, who is it?

DH: I don’t know about the best. I know when Hélio first got in the car, he was very, very good. We were all expecting big things out of Castroneves when he first started, because I think I want to say one of his first drives was at Gateway, which is a challenging track, and he did an amazing job.

Also, I don’t know if you remember, but in 2003, Tony Kanaan got hurt at Motegi in Japan.

MT: Right.

DH: And they had a scheduled IndyCar test at Indianapolis, so Mario Andretti [at 63 years old] drove the test in Kanaan’s car. I took that chance to work with Mario, and believe it or not, he was absolutely amazing in that car. He drove the car with the throttle, which was surprising for a car of that vintage.

MT: When you say he was amazing, what exactly do you mean? Was it the feedback he could give? His understanding of how a car worked, how a tire worked? Or was it kind of back to a Moore kind of thing where it’s like somehow the guy could wheel the hell out of a car by the seat of his pants?

DH: Mario could tell you—even at Indianapolis where the corners are what, I don’t know, 4.5 seconds long or whatever, which is a lot of time spent in a corner—he could tell you exactly what the car was doing on entry, at the apex, as you come off the apex, as you come off the exit of the corner. He could tell you exactly what his inputs to the car were, where his hands were. I think a lot of these guys that we talk about how great of a driver they were, they had the ability to not only drive the car but also come back to the pits and talk about it and explain it. And explain what they were feeling.

From our perspective, from a development perspective, that’s what we needed to help make the tires better, help make the tires faster. It was an understanding of, OK, where’s our gap? Where’s our primary gap and where’s our primary thing that we can improve to go quicker, or to make the driver more comfortable or to make the tire more consistent over a stint?

MT: I suspect there’s no easy answer here, but after all your years in racing, if you could only ever tell people one story, which one do you choose?

DH: Yeah, it would be extremely hard to do that because it was such an interesting time in the sport. It was such an amazing time for Firestone. One of the things I haven’t talked about is that Firestone obviously is a Bridgestone brand. Bridgestone’s a global company with a rich heritage in motorsports, as well. So, when we returned to CART in ’95, the superspeedway tires, like the tire that won the Michigan 500, were produced in Tokyo, by Bridgestone. And we worked side by side with the Bridgestone engineers.

When we won the race at Loudon, those were tires produced in Akron. And we felt a sense of pride for both victories, but I think the sense of pride was a little bit larger when it was the tire made by the people here in Akron. But I don't know if I could narrow it down to one story. [If I had to], it probably would be our first win at Indianapolis in ’96 with Buddy Lazier. He had hurt his back earlier in the season. A lot of the last part of the race was under caution, and he actually pulls—I think he had something hurt on his hand. He would pull his hand out of the car, and you could see him flexing his hand going down the straightaway. But really overall, I think it would be around just the accomplishment and the excitement of winning the races when we had the Goodyear competition.

MT: Last question. If it’s too difficult to choose an overall best driver, let’s make it more specific: Who are you choosing for outright speed, raw talent, balls to the wall over one lap?

DH: My mind has to go back to Montoya. I think he was probably the best raw talent at just pulling every last thing out of the car that it had.

The 2026 IndyCar season begins in St. Petersburg, Florida, on March 1. John Oreovicz’s Class of ’99 is available via various book retailers. And Dale Harrigle continues to obsess about making better tires.

Additional Photography Courtesy of Dale Harrigle