[1] The AAA Contest Board dissolved and decided to focus strictly on helping the automobiling public as a result of the 1955 Le Mans disaster.
The National Motor Car Championship was the first time in American auto racing history that a points system was used to officially decide an annual champion.
After World War I, the race car specifications for the national championship were mostly aligned with what the Indianapolis Motor Speedway wanted to run during its Memorial Day classic, and this still holds mostly true today.
After that season, AAA completely pulled out of auto racing, citing the Le Mans disaster and the death of Bill Vukovich at Indianapolis as contributing factors.
[2] The Indianapolis Motor Speedway and other Midwestern promoters formed a "Temporary Emergency Committee," later known as the United States Auto Club (USAC), to replace the AAA.
At the international level, the Automobile Competition Committee for the United States (AACUS) replaced the AAA Contest Board as the national sporting authority representative to the FIA.
On two separate occasions, Contest Board record keepers changed the results of certain seasons, and used extraneous points tables and methods to calculate retrospective national champions for years in which one had not been declared.
These actions collectively have made it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction regarding the first two decades of AAA sanctioned national championship racing.
By reworking the 1920 docket, adding five events that were originally run as non-points or "exhibition" races, the pair effectively stripped Gaston Chevrolet of his 1920 championship; instead declaring Tommy Milton the new champion.
Using his own devised system of awarding championship points, and building upon the erroneous work previously generated by Means and Haresnape, Catlin fabricated, distorted, and/or negated AAA Contest Board records for 1902–1920.
[10] All retrospectively awarded championships named by Means & Haresnape and Catlin are unequivocally considered unofficial by professional historians and statisticians.
Furthermore, most consider them revisionist history, and discredit the entire effort made by both parties as illegitimate, unnecessary, fictional, and not consistent with contemporary accounts.
[11] In more recent years historians have encountered resistance and disinterest on the part of IndyCar Series leadership, and as of 2024, the granite base of the Astor Challenge Cup awarded to American National Champions continues to ignore the 1905 Championship won by Barney Oldfield and unjustly list Tommy Milton instead of Gaston Chevrolet as the 1920 Champion.