INDIANAPOLIS – Tiregate is now archives, they all assure us. Tony Stewart swears it. Jeff Gordon guarantees it personally. NASCAR and Goodyear and maybe even your sweet old grandmother promise it will never, ever happen again.

The Festival of Exploding Rubber that was the 2008 Allstate 400 at the Brickyard?

Ancient history.

But what about the car?

What about that heavy old aerodynamic dunce called the Car of Tomorrow, a piano case on wheels that was half the problem last year? What about all those brutal right-front loads that, combined with the cheese-grater surface of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, took last year’s tires down to the cords in less than 10 laps?

“I don’t see (the car) changing,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said a week ago, in response to a question about why they all keep running into each other at Talladega and Daytona.

Shorthand answer from Junior: It’s the car.

On the one hand, it’s so safe, they can all run into each other. On the other, it handles like a Grade A pork product in traffic, so they will keep running into each other.

“The CoT has really got everybody in a box,” Earnhardt said. “We’re all basically out there competing in the same thing. I can’t do anything, or I can’t be any more creative than the next guy.”

And woe to anyone who tries, of course. Tinker with the CoT, and it’s Fine City. It’s Suspension City. And it’s killing, absolutely killing, the sport.

Junior might never say that, but somebody needs to. As NASCAR brings its economy-battered show this week to the site of its worst debacle, anything that might help restore its swagger bears examining.

I’ll start with the car.

I’ll start by saying that if you want to engage the fan base again, you’ve got to do more than give them a cookie-cutter car on cookie-cutter tracks. You’ve got to give them a rooting interest. And right now, with the CoT, they have none.

What was it Junior said? They’re basically out there competing in the same thing?

That’s the problem. With the CoT, a Ford is a Chevy is a Toyota is a Dodge. There isn’t a lick of difference, because NASCAR won’t allow it. And that’s just plain myopic.

Here’s a story for you: In 1964, when Plymouth came out with the Hemi engine, NASCAR banned it for a time because it blew the doors off everyone. But it was a direct response to Ford and Chevy – which, a year earlier, unveiled their own 427-cubic-inch beasts that blew the doors off everyone.

One manufacturer ups the ante; another calls and raises. That’s what racing is supposed to be about, and that’s why the fans flocked to it.

You want them to flock to it again, take the handcuffs off the garage area. Let all those mad-genius types hunker down with their slide rules. If one of ’em hits on something that works, the others will catch up. That’s racing.

Or rather, that was racing.

“I wish there was a way to make the racing to where if I have a really, really good car, I can get away from this guy in this car that’s not so good,” Earnhardt said. “(But) I don’t see NASCAR changing anything. They will build the fence higher and stronger before they do anything to keep us from running into each other. I think they made the cars safer because they knew we were going to keep crashing.

“The right people ain’t complaining about the racing. And that’s the fans.”

Well. Now’s their time.