Norris McDonald's Auto Racing Blog

Ron Fellows gets full-time World Challenge ride

Just like the Energizer bunny, Mississauga auto racer Ron Fellows keeps going and going and going.

At an age when most racing drivers are starting to slow down, or at least thinking about it (he turned 50 last September), Fellows is cranking things up a notch instead.

After several seasons of relative inactivity (he stopped driving full-time for Corvette Racing in the American Le Mans Series in 2007, although he continued to race several times a year in NASCAR), it was announced today that Fellows will drive full-time this season for CRP Racing of Harrisburg, N.C., in the 2010 SCCA World Challenge GT Championship.

Which means Fellows, who will wheel a Corvette C6 in the 12-race series, will be racing twice in the Toronto area this season: at Mosport International Raceway May 21-23 when the World Challenge GT is the headliner, and again at the Honda Indy Toronto July 16-18, where it will play a supporting role as part of the IZOD IndyCar Series weekend.

Fellows is arguably Canada’s most successful – and versatile – international road-racing star. His curriculum vitae includes:

– Winning the 24 Hours of Daytona in 2001;

– Winning class championships at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2001, ’02 and ’04;

– Winning two class championships at the 12 Hours of Sebring (2002, 2004);

– Winning the American Le Mans Series GTS class championship (2002, 2003, 2004);;

– Nineteen race wins in the SCCA Trans-Am Series;

– Five top ten finishes in the NASCAR Sprint Cup series (he always says if he doesn’t win a Cup race, his career will end with “unfinished business”);

– Four victories and seven top ten finishes in the NASCAR Nationwide Series (he won the 2008 Nationwide Series race at Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal);

– Two wins and five top tens (plus three poles) in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series.

It doesn’t matter who you are, be it Gilles Villeneuve, Jacques Villeneuve or Paul Tracy, your record doesn’t come anywhere near that of Ron Fellows.

And now he’s going to be looking to add to those totals.

He’s no stranger to the World Challenge Series. Between 2004 and 2007, he won three races (two at Mosport and one at Long Beach, Calif.) and earned four other podium finishes.

Fellows was also fastest qualifier three times.

In a release, CRP Racing owner, Nicholas Short, said he was excited to have a driver of Ron Fellows’ caliber join his team.

“I’ve known Ron since the Trans-Am days and when the opportunity arose to have him drive for us, it was a very easy decision,” Short said. “I couldn’t be happier having him join CRP Racing.”

The team, which will make its first start of the season March 26-28 as part of the Indy car weekend at St. Petersburg, Fla., will be sponsored by Carlisle Companies, Inc. which is a diversified global manufacturing company serving industries ranging from foodservice to aerospace to specialty trailers to construction materials to specialty tires and wheels.

In addition to his World Challenge duties, Fellows also has irons in the fire for NASCAR starts this season in the Sprint Cup and Nationwide Series.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

(It's the bunny, get it?)

AIM Autosport takes Grand Am Rolex green flag

When last we heard of the No. 61 AIM Autosport Daytona Prototype Ford-Riley, it was October ’09 and the team of Mark Wilkins and Burt Frisselle had driven the car to an eighth place finish in the season-ending Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series race at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida.

That finishing position gave the Woodbridge-based racing team a sixth-place finish in the championship. Although the team didn’t reach the podium (as compared to two victories in the ’08 season), a season of consistent finishes with just one DNF was a major improvement on the four DNFs the year before.

Okay, so that was then and this is now. This weekend at - again - Homestead-Miami Speedway, AIM will launch its assault on the 2010 Rolex championship at the Grand Prix of Miami.

Drivers Wilkins and Frisselle are back and the Miami race will also be the first of a two race primary sponsorship by Pacific Mobile, a Canadian company that specializes in Bluetooth accessories for mobile devices.

AIM took the car to Carolina Motorsport Park last week for some shakedown testing and everybody on the team, but particularly the drivers, are itching to get to Miami.

The Grand Prix goes on Saturday at 5 p.m. It can be seen live on Speed TV and will also be aired live on the Motor Racing Network (MRN).

Meantime, back on the Indy car front, Milka Duno announced Friday that she will run a full season with Dale Coyne Racing (no, she is not going to drive the Boy Scouts of America-sponsored car), bringing to three the number of full-time women drivers in the championship (Danica Patrick and Simona De Silvestro being the others).

When the IZOD IndyCar season starts in Brazil a week from Sunday, there should be four females in the race - the three full-timers plus Indy Lights standout Ana Beatriz, who has a one-off for her home race. She’s being managed by ex-Penske driver Andre Ribeiro, who's beating the bushes for additional sponsorship so Beatriz can run the full season.

Shocker: Formula Atlantic pulls plug on 2010 season

Sad news.

One of North America’s most famous racing series, the Formula Atlantic Championship, has had to cancel is 2010 season because it doesn’t have any drivers.

The series that gave the world Gilles Villeneuve, Bobby Rahal, Keke Rosberg, Howdy Holmes and Bertil Roose, to name a few, has been forced to go on “hiatus” because of what it calls a serious shortage of funded drivers.

In a statement, Atlantic series owner Ben Johnston said that, “the Atlantic Championship has and always will be committed to providing the best driver development series available to the world’s next generation of top-tier driving talent. Unfortunately, however, this experience cannot be upheld through 2010.

“Series officials will continue working throughout the year to develop new ideas for the future that will add value to drivers and also lower costs associated with competing in a world-class racing series like the Atlantic Championship.”

Atlantic officials had tried a number of ways to attract young up-and-comers, the most recent – and important – being the capping of the cost of a season at just under $500,000.

Even that wasn’t enough.

The writing was really on the wall last year when frequently fewer than 10 cars were entered in races and one of them was often driven by an owner in order to fill out the field.

Even then, the calibre of drivers was to-notch because Atlantic competition was an excellent environment to prepare young drivers to continue on up the ladder, be it to sports cars (the American Le Mans Series), European formula cars (Formula One or one of its ladder series) or Indy cars.

In fact, Simona De Silvestro, a 21-year-old Swiss driver who finished third in last year’s championship, signed a contract earlier this week to drive in the 2010 IZOD IndyCar Series.

But now it’s over – for the moment.

Ironically, less than two years ago, the Atlantic Championship, which was operated for years by Vicky O’Connor, named its 35th Anniversary All-Star team going back to its beginnings in the mid-1970s when the first two titles – in ’74 and ’75 – were won by Toronto driver Bill Brack.

Of the hundreds of drivers who competed in that fabulous series over the years, 10 were singled out for being the best of the best. And Brack was front and centre in there with (in alphabetical order) A.J. Allmendinger, Claude Bourbonnais, Patrick Carpentier, Mark Dismore, David Empringham, Jon Fogarty, Jimmy Vasser, Gilles Villeneuve and his brother, Jacques Villeneuve.

Six of the 10 were Canadians – Bourbonnais, Carpentier, Empringham, Gilles and Jacques Villeneuve and Brack. Not bad, eh?

Fifteen other drivers received honourable mention. They were (again in alphabetical order) Michael Andretti, Alex Barron, Price Cobb, Tom Gloy, Scott Goodyear, Richie Hearn, Howdy Holmes, Anthony Lazzaro, Dan Marvin, Roberto Moreno, Hoover Orsi, Bobby Rahal, Buddy Rice, Keke Rosberg and Jacques Villeneuve, the son.

All-time lists can sometimes be misleading. Series’ have ups and downs and the quality of fields in one year can be remarkably higher or lower than in another.

Brack, for instance, was in really tough company in the ’70s. But go back a few years – to 2005, say – when there were frequently only eight or nine cars on track and only four drivers contested every race in the championship. The entry list wasn’t exactly made up of household names.

The Champ Car World Series took control during the war it had with the IRL and got the entry list up to nearly 30 for a couple of years but when the split ended and there was peace in our time the Atlantics started to drift again and despite the best efforts of Johnston and others it’s hit the end of the road.

Temporarily, it’s hoped.

With the Formula-BMW Americas Series gone, it left Atlantics and Indy Lights to carry on in 2010. Indy Lights is in no great shape, either, with only 14 drivers taking part in a pre-season test in Alabama last week.

But 14 is better than one or two, which was the case with the Atlantics.

Michael Andretti always said that 2010 would be the crunch year for auto racing. He’s been proved right in the minor leagues. In the majors, Formula One is in a bit of a mess but NASCAR and IndyCar look healthy, to date.

Whether they continue to be in good shape as the season unfolds will bear watching.

Alex Ellis fundraiser Saturday in St. Kitts

If you’re going to go to a dance, you need a little time to plan – correct?

So today’s entry will be a reminder that there’s a shindig planned in St. Catharines on Saturday night in support of Alex Ellis, a teenage auto racing sensation who’s in the hunt for moolah to continue his racing career.

Ellis recently won the Jim Russell Future Driver Search competition, the prize of which is a partially funded ride in the 2010 Jim Russell Championship Series plus some coaching and testing opportunities.

Ex-F1 pilot Allan McNish, who’s also a two-time Le Mans 24 Hour race winner, chaired the panel that chose the 18-year-old Ellis from among 40 others at a special tryout in California. According to McNish, Ellis was selected because he was the best “all-rounder” so far as speed, pace, media awareness, racecraft and fitness were concerned.

But only $130,000 of the $230,000 cost to do the Russell championship has been covered, which leaves Ellis about $100,000 short. To raise some of the money, he’s planning a dinner-dance in St. Catharines on Saturday (March 6). Tickets are $100, with $20 from every ticket going to Community Care.

In explaining the charitable donation, Ellis said this: “If I need the support of the community, it is only right to support the community as much as I can in return.”

For details of the fundraiser, go to maris-ellis@cogeco.ca or phone 905-646-1533.

If you don’t dance, you could consider sending the kid a cheque. Every little bit helps. I’ve seen him in action (like every other young driver out there he has F1 aspirations) and he’s got the goods. Now he just needs the dough.

 

Danica's got company; CNN to sponsor Lotus in F1

Two items of immense interest today.

ANOTHER WOMAN FOR INDYCAR

Several weeks ago, I wrote in a newspaper column that if the IZOD IndyCar Series wanted to set itself apart, it would become the league of women drivers.

I said that it already had Danica Patrick, Milka Duno and Sarah Fisher and that, if it was smart, it would encourage the elevation of Indy Lights runners Pippa Mann and Ana Beatriz to the big time, help to bring back Champ Car veteran Kathryn Legge and go hunting for Formula Atlantic standout Simona De Silvestro.

Well, you can’t have everything, it seems, but you can have some things.

Last night, Indianapolis-based HVM Racing announced that it had signed De Silvestro for the 2010 Indy car season with sponsorship from Stargate Resistance (an online game) and secondary sponsorship from FireSky, Cheyenne Mountain Games and Cardinal Technologies (other online gaming developers) and Bernard Richards Manufacture (a French watch company).

De Silvestro will also lead the "Do Not Text ‘n Drive" campaign, which is designed to increase public awareness about the dangers of texting and driving (which was the subject of colleague Lorraine Sommerfeld’s column in Toronto Star Wheels last Saturday and which is online now at wheels.ca).

For De Silvestro, who’s 21 and from Switzerland, the 2010 Indy car season will be her sixth year in North American open-wheel racing. Last year – I saw her race at Mosport and was really impressed – she won four races in the Atlantic series and won four pole positions. In all, she had nine podiums in 2009 and finished third in the series behind Jonathan Summerton and John Edwards. In so doing, she became the first woman to earn the most wins, pole positions and to lead the most laps in a single season in Atlantics.

The Indy car season opens in Brazil on March 14. De Silvestro and Patrick (Duno and Fisher only race the ovals) will go head-to-head in the Honda Indy Toronto on July 18.

This is great news for the series and you really hope it exploits her signing. Maybe Danica won't be all that thrilled but competition on as well as off the track never hurt anybody and IndyCar could - and should - thrive, as a result.

BULLETIN

The CNN International news organization - TV news, primarily, with an increasing presence in digital delivery of news via the Internet - will sponsor the new Lotus F1 team, it was announced today.

CNN's world-famous logo will appear on the cars and uniforms of drivers Heikki Kovalainen and Jarno Trulli hrough the 2010 season and beyond.

"The combination of two such iconic and aspirational global brands fits perfectly with CNN's worldwide reach and brand positioning," said Rani R. Raad, senior vice-president of CNN International Advertising Sales, in a release.

"This partnership . . . takes CNN into a new era of marketing and promotions and puts us in front of a worldwide audience of millions."

Once upon a time, before the recession, media companies frequently sponsored race teams. The magazine Newsweek and the wire service company Reuters were frequently involved with teams in Formula One. In North America, TV networks and radio and TV stations were often associate sponsors of cars entered in the Indianapolis 500.

Other than the Olympics, Formula One is frequently cited as the best bet for companies and corporations interested in expanding either their business or reputations via advertising sponsorships.

The Grand prix season opens a week from next weekend in Bahrain.