Norris McDonald's Auto Racing Blog

Has Ecclestone got Texas, New Jersey mixed up?

This was on the Reuters news wire this morning:

LONDON — Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone has cast doubt on New Jersey hosting a Grand Prix in June, 2013, despite a 10-year agreement announced last year.

"Maybe the New York race will be 2013," he told the BBC on Tuesday. "It's a when — 2013 or 2014."

The east-coast race is likely to be coupled with Canada on successive weekends and would give the United States two rounds of the championship, with Austin in Texas due to make a debut on the calendar this November if its new circuit is ready in time.

New Jersey's street-circuit race is due to be held on the banks of the Hudson River with New York's Manhattan skyline as a backdrop.

The United States, a key market for Formula One manufacturers such as Ferrari and Mercedes as well as team sponsors, has not had a Grand Prix since Indianapolis in 2007.

Is Bernie's brain overworked these days? Has he got too much on his mind? Has he got New Jersey mixed up with Austin, as a result?

As the story says, Austin can host a U.S. GP this year "if its new circuit is ready in time." New Jersey, on the other hand, could hold a race tomorrow. The “track” is there; they just have to repave the streets. I had a photo in my blog last week of their garages and pits that seem to be further ahead today than Austin’s.

The fact of the matter is that F1, in the end, could care less about Austin. New York is the prize. The sponsors (and the beautiful people) want Montreal and New York in North America, just like they want Monaco in Europe.

In the minds of F1 people, Austin will be up there with Hicksville (a.k.a. Indianapolis) in no time.

Tony Kanaan wins Long Beach GP (not really, but . . .)

WEEKEND HEADLINES

1. Rosberg wins F1 race for Mercedes - what a coincidence

2. Power wins IndyCar race but Kanaan is real winner

3. NASCAR goes crazy over truck race at Rockingham. Really.

4. Other racing

Nico Rosberg won the first race of his 111-race Grand Prix career and he drove a Mercedes Silver Arrows into Victory Lane for the first time since 1955 to do it at Sunday’s Grand Prix of China.

The fact that shareholders at a Mercedes-Benz meeting last week called for the company to pull out of F1 racing and that the team is most unhappy with the way Bernie Ecclestone has been manipulating the signing of the new Concorde Agreement has nothing at all to do with the two surprising victories – apparently.

To get the nuts and bolts out of the way before getting into my latest conspiracy theory, Rosberg won the first pole of his career on Saturday and then ran away with Sunday’s race to finish well clear of second–place finisher Jenson Button, who was driving a McLaren powered by a Mercedes engine.

McLaren-Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton was third, for the third time in three races this season, while Mark Webber finished fourth for Red Bull-Renault - his third straight fourth-place finish. Defending world champion Sebastien Vettel was fifth (complete results here).

They say the best time to tune into an NFL game is after the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter and that was the case with Sunday’s Grand Prix, as all of the excitement happened in the last few laps.

With five laps to go in the 58-lap contest, Kimi Raikkonen was holding down second place for Lotus-Renault, with Vettel third, Button fourth, Webber fifth and Hamilton sixth. At the finish, it was Button second, Hamilton third, Webber fourth and Vettel fifth with Raikkonen all the way back in 14^th as his two-stop gamble saw his tires disintegrate.

It was a good race with lots to talk about afterward, such as Michael Schumacher’s second retirement in three races (he’d started second but his crew failed to tighten his right-front wheel at the first pit stop and he was forced to pull off the circuit before he crashed), whether Button could have caught Rosberg if his crew hadn’t taken so long to tighten his left-rear tire on his final pit stop (nearly 10 seconds), and whether the Mercedes F-duct front wing system gives that team an unfair advantage (at least until everybody else copies it).

One side note:

I don’t want to sound like Don Cherry but F1 will rue the day it did not put a stop to side-by-side "racing" on pit lane. McLaren released Hamilton from a pit stop early in the race and Lotus gave Raikkonen the signal to go as Hamilton drew alongside. Raikkonen and Hamilton then went side-by-side till the end of the pit (albeit on the speed limiters), at which point Raikkonen gave way to Hamilton.

Analyst David Coulthard went so far as to say the pit lane "is part of the race track" but it shouldn’t be. As in IndyCar, teams should have to hold the driver till the coast is clear. Otherwise, there will be a collision in there one of these days and somebody will get hurt. That shouldn’t have to happen in order to force F1 to act.

Now F1 travels to Bahrain where the majority Shiite population feels oppressed by a minority Sunni family headed by Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. This political unrest forced the cancellation of the race last year and there are again fears of revolution.

As Bob Varsha said on Speed TV Sunday, "We worry that this sporting event will turn into a news event." For that, we will have to wait and see.

Meantime, I have to say that I never believed that a car race could be fixed until it was proved that Nelson Piquet Jr., Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds conspired at the 2008 Grand Prix of Singapore to create a situation (Piquet would crash on purpose) that would benefit his teammate, Fernando Alonso, who then went on to win the race.

The reason they did this was because Renault had not won a race for close to two years and was reportedly considering leaving the sport.

In no way do I think Nico Rosberg or anybody else in Sunday’s Grand Prix did anything knowingly illegal or immoral, but I still find it really interesting that – on the heels of suggestions that Mercedes might not continue in the sport – the team suddenly has wonderful success.

When there is big business at play, and there are billions of dollars at stake, anything is possible. Anything. And it goes beyond Formula One. The National Hockey League’s mission statement is that come hell or high water, it will sell hockey in the United States. Ergo, it is no coincidence that, with the exception of the Vancouver Canucks, every professional hockey team in Canada stinks. Remember that, and believe it.

The Mercedes shareholders revolt is being led by a fund manager named Ingo Spech of the Daimler shareholder Union Investment. Worried that Mercedes is losing ground to rivals BMW and Audi, Spech called on Daimler to pull its Mercedes team out of F1, just as BMW withdrew several years ago. His motion reportedly drew support from other large investors.

In a parallel development, Ecclestone announced several weeks ago that he had agreed terms on a new contract with a "majority" of teams but not Williams and Mercedes.

Mercedes has not commented publicly but reports suggest the company - if it remains unhappy - could either challenge the contract, citing the European Union’s competition laws, or else walk away from F1.

So with Mercedes and its shareholders down in the dumps over its involvement in F1, what better medicine than success? So a company that hasn’t won a Grand Prix since 1955 - Juan Manuel Fangio was the driver then - suddenly wins one.

And to put an exclamation mark on that, there are Mercedes engines in all of the first three cars. And Nico Rosberg, who’s always shown lots of promise but hasn’t been able to follow through until now, suddenly delivers in spades.

It will be verrrry interesting, as Arte Johnson used to say, to see if Rosberg can keep it up.

Why do I say that?

Well, do you remember the Belgian Grand Prix of 2009? That was two years after two Indian businessmen bought the Spyker F1 team (which had previously been owned by Canadian businessman Alex Schnaider’s Midland Group, who’d bought it from Eddie Jordan) and renamed it Force India.

Force India had entered 29 races and hadn’t scored a point and there were suggestions that if it didn’t finish high enough in the standings to qualify for a share of F1's travel and TV money that it would either be shut down or put up for sale again.

That year, there were 20 cars in F1. Nobody wanted to lose another two. Veteran Force India driver Giancarlo Fisichella qualified most of the time at the back of the pack that season. In fact, three times in 20 races he was dead last; twice he was 19^th, twice he was 18^th – and, well, you get my drift.

The race before the Belgian GP that year was the European Grand prix at Valencia. Fisichella qualified 16^th and finished 12^th. The race after Belgium was in Italy, where he qualified 14^th and finished ninth.

But at Belgium that year, he qualified on the pole – yes, really – and finished second in the race. The points he earned, plus the fourth-place finish at the Italian GP by his teammate, Adrien Sutil, gave the team enough points to finish high enough in the standings to qualify for financial aid.

What a coicidence. . .

As I said, if something has to happen in F1 (or any other mega-billion-dollar sport) to make somebody happy, it happens.

2. Kanaan wins Long Beach Grand Prix, Hinch second

Okay, Tony Kanaan didn't win. He officially finished fourth in Sunday's Grand Prix of Long Beach (official results here) but because the IZOD IndyCar Series penalized 14 of the 26 starters for unauthorized engine changes, and gave those 14 drivers 10-grid-position penalties, I think it must be taken into consideration when calculating who really won the race in California on Sunday.

Officially, Will Power won the race, with Simon Pagenaud second and Hinchcliffe third. Fourth was Kanaan and fifth was J.R. Hildebrand.

However, because of the stupidity of sticking to the engine-change rule rather than taking the spirit of the rule into consideration (which would have seen the penalties suspended – see my blogs on this in posts below), here is the way the race should really have been scored:

Kanaan qualified 10^th but was made to start 19^th (which is not a 10-grid-position penalty but this thing is so complicated that you will just have to bear with me). He officially finished fourth, which is an improvement of 15 positions. But because he was only penalized nine places instead of 10, we have to dock him a position, so he only improved 14 positions. But nobody did it better on Sunday in Long Beach than this.

Hinchcliffe qualified sixth but then was made to start 16^th – a full 10-grid-position penalty. Because he eventually came home third, that means he improved his position 13 places, which puts him second behind Kanaan's 14, in my books.

Will Power finished third in my "race" because he qualified second, was made to start 12^th, and then finished first for an improvement of 12 positions. Good for him – but not as good as Kanaan and Hinchcliffe.

Oh, before somebody says J.R. Hildebrand should have made it onto my podium, consider this: he qualified 16^th, was only penalized four places instead of 10 (he should have had to go off 26^th but you’d have to ask the geniuses at IndyCar why he didn’t) and so by improving his position from 20^th to fifth, he made up 15 places but really only nine.

UNDERSTAND???

I’m going to stop now because I’m getting a headache. Let’s just hope IndyCar never does this to us again.

3. NASCAR tries to inject excitement into non-crashing boredom

After putting on two of the most boring big-league races in the history of NASCAR, the sanctioning body’s management group pulled out all the stops Sunday afternoon by arriving en masse at Rockingham Speedway in North Carolina to watch a Camping World Series truck race that turned out to be about as boring as the Nationwide and Sprint Cup races that preceded it.

NASCAR is all about crashing. If there is no crashing, there is no excitement. The strategy of the drivers and teams is predicated on yellow flags necessitating pit stops where tire changes, fuel fill-ups and chassis changes can be completed.

No yellows means big trouble because, on top of everything else, the fans get restless.

Friday night’s Nationwide race at Texas Motor Speedway was a yawn (Ricky Stenhouse Jr. the winner). Saturday night’s Sprint Cup race there was no better (Greg Biffle the winner, with but two yellows – including one for a hat that blew out on the track). The commentators spent much of the time explaining why "long green runs" are bad for teams.

So Sunday afternoon, NASCAR president Mike Helton and his entourage flew into Rockingham to say how much NASCAR liked being back at one of its spiritual home tracks. Unfortunately, the truck race that followed (Kasey Kahne the winner, with James Buescher second (James who? See what I mean?) and Matt Crafton third (ditto) was about as unexciting as the two stock-car snoozers.

Rockingham used to be NASCAR’s third race of the season. For years and years, the series would start with the Daytona 500, then go north to Richmond, Va., for the second race, Rockingham for the third and Atlanta the fourth (usually held the same weekend as the start of Ontario’s March break, which used to guarantee a huge snowstorm for all those folks driving their kids to Myrtle Beach or Jacksonville).

But those races were cold for everybody. It was winter, after all. So NASCAR wised up and went west and that’s why, after Daytona, there are now races in sunny (or sunnier) southern California, Arizona and Nevada.

They made those changes eight years ago and since Rockingham only had one race on the NASCAR schedule at the time, it meant the end of racing at the facility. Traditional NASCAR fans were not happy

Owner Andy Hillenburg, a former racer, bought the place at auction five years and has been sprucing it up since. He finally convinced NASCAR to give him something – anything – and they responded by adding a truck race there to the schedule.

Hillenburg said he was happy with the turnout Sunday – the NASCAR communications folks used the term "nearly full grandstands" – but it could have been better. A lot better. In fact, there were a lot of empty seats. But that’s understandable, because truck racing ain’t Cup and Cup is what used to pack the place.

But it’s a start and Helton’s presence was a bit like a blessing from the Pope. The symbolism was obvious: keep tryin’, son, and someday you might see stock cars at this place again.

The bloom is off the NASCAR rose (and if there are any more races like the ones on the weekend, that rose will soon be wilting). Going forward, you can predict the strategy: it was a Southern sport to begin with; to revive it, what better way than to return it to its roots.

And there's probably no better place to do that, than at the Rock.

4. Other racing:

Klaus Graf and Lucas Luhr, driving the Muscle Milk Honda Performance Development ARX-03 LMP1 car, won the Tequila Patrón American Le Mans Series at Long Beach for the second straight season Saturday.

Tommy Milner and Oliver Gavin gave Corvette Racing its first victory at Long Beach since 2009 and its first in ALMS since Mosport last July by finishing first in the GT class.

Kyle Marcelli of Barrie finished fourth in the Prototype Challenge class. Tony Burgess of Toronto was eighth in PC.

In World of Outlaws Sprint Car Racing, Joey Saldana won the round at Paducah Speedway in Kentucky.

The ALMS and the Outlaws will both be racing in southern Ontario in July - the sports cars at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park (nee Mosport) and the Outlaws at Ohswegen Speedway near Brantford.

Rosberg, Mercedes win Chinese Grand Prix

SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: Nico Rosberg won the first F1 race of his career and Mercedes won its first Grand Prix since 1955 at the Chinese Grand Prix today. Rosberg won from pole and was followed across the line by Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton for McLaren-Mercedes and Mark Webber and Sebastien Vettel for Red Bull-Renault. Michael Schumacher, who started second beside his young Mercedes teammate, dropped out after a front wheel was incorrectly installed at the first pit stop. Fernando Alonso, meantime, was ninth for Ferrari. Back to the drawing board for that team. Now the circus goes to Bahrain and F1 is about to get some publicity it could very much do without. Official results

SATURDAY EVENING UPDATE: Greg Biffle won the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway Saturday night, with Jimmie Johnson second and Mark Martin third. The race was kinda boring.

Meantime, Ryan Briscoe won the pole for Sunday's Long Beach Grand Prix for the IZOD IndyCar Series but will likely start 11th because of the 10-grid-position penalty handed out to him because Chevrolet decided to change the engine in his car.

In all, 14 drivers - more than half the field - will be penalized because of engine changes, suggesting force majeure is in play. But rather than suspending the rule that calls for penalties if a car's engine is changed, the IndyCar brain trust (I'm using that word very loosely) has decided to stick to its guns, presumably so it won't appear weak and indecisive.

It apparently has never heard of the word "logical."

Appearing to be stupid also hasn't registered with them.

This nonsense ranks up there with the six cars that made up the field for the U.S. Grand Prix at Indianapolis in 2005 after all the other cars pulled into the pits following the formation lap.

IndyCar sent out the qualification results on Saturday night with these words:

"Qualifying Saturday for the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach IZOD IndyCar Series event on the 1.968 mile(s) Streets of Long Beach, with starting position (my emphasis), car number in parentheses, driver, chassis-engine,time and speed in parentheses:"

It didn't mention that what followed would not be the way the cars will line up for the race - primarily because the brain trust is still trying to figure that out.

They say they'll wait till after the warmup session Sunday before posting the starting positions in case somebody else has to change an engine. (Hey, I just thought of something: what if one of the cars that has already changed an engine, and will be assessed a 10-grid-position penalty, has to change its engine again? Will the driver of that car be handed a TWENTY-grid-position penalty?)

You want confusion? Panther Racing, which runs J.R. Hildebrand, headed its post-qualifying session release this way: "Hildebrand qualifies 16th in Long Beach, expected to start 20th?"

(WAIT A MINUTE! STOP THE PRESSES! THAT'S ONLY A FOUR-GRID-POSITION PENALTY! WHO'S IN CHARGE THERE? OH, I FORGOT. IT'S INDYCAR!)

And that, ladies and gentlemen, will be where things really get out of control and where the bad feelings will surface: some cars will be penalized 10 places and others won't. Want to bet that somebody doesn't serve notice before the start that they're racing under protest?

By the way, things were already out of control during qualifying. Dario Franchitti was in the final group going for pole but he was driving the only car that hadn't changed an engine. Said Dario (paraphrase): "I didn't exactly stand on it out there because I knew where I was going to start."

That place is first. Josef Newgarden, who didn't even qualify for what IndyCar calls the Fast Six, will start second Sunday afternoon.

(How would you have liked being a spectator at Long Beach Saturday? You don't follow this sport particularly closely but you attend this race. You watch the cars run and you see Briscoe celebrating and you hear him interviewed and you see the names and numbers on the scoreboard and you go home thinking you've just seen qualifying. When you get up Sunday morning, the lineup is in the paper. But when you get to the race and the cars are lined up, you discover that everything has changed. Everything - particularly Briscoe, who was first Saturday and is now somewhere back in the pack Sunday. And you're supposed to understand this?)

Okay, I've said the last I'll say about this silliness. It is what it is. It's just a shame, however, that a series still on the ropes like IndyCar is being run by numbskulls.

So Briscoe won the pole, Will Power was second, Ryan Hunter-Reay was third, Franchitti was fourth, EJ Viso was fifth, James Hinchcliffe was sixth and Newgarden seventh.

After the penalties are applied, Franchitti and Newgarden will start on the front row. After that, who knows?

SATURDAY MORNING UPDATE: Nico Rosberg is on pole for the Chinese Grand Prix with his Mercedes teammate, Michael Schumacher, next to him on the front row after second-fastest qualifyer Lewis Hamilton was penalized for a gearbox change. Jenson Button will go off sixth, Fernando Alonso ninth and Sebastien Vettell 11th. Wow. Here's the qualifying story and the lineup.

FRIDAY NIGHT UPDATE: Ricky Stenhouse Jr. won the NASCAR Nationwide Series stock car race at Texas Motor Speedway. Paul Menard was second and Kasey Kahne third. Danica Patrick finished eighth and Steve Arpin of Fort Frances, Ont., finished tenth in his first start of 2012. Well done.

I was thinking about the insanity of F1 bulldozing ahead with plans to race in Bahrain next weekend and IndyCar sticking to its guns and insisting on penalizing 14 drivers 10 grid positions at the Long Beach Grand Prix because of "unauthorized engine changes," when I remembered a passage in a book about Peter Revson that was published in 1974.

Speed With Style was co-written by Revson and the late Autweek editor, Leon Mandell. In a chapter about the 1973 U.S. Grand Prix where Francois Cevert had beeen killed, after which the teams and drivers carried on their business pretty much as if nothing had happened, Mandell wrote:

"As I watched the joking and the laughing in the pits, I wondered about the racers and their world. It seemed to me they were so out of touch with everything that did not concern racing that they were taking a terrible chance. One of these days, I thought, these people were going to drive down a race-track access road that leads to the main highway and when they get there they are going to find the highway is gone. There will be nothing but wisps of smoke, some blackened fields, and a twisted tree. While World War III had started and ended . . . these people (would be) unaware they are the last humans left alive . . . not realizing that the world had ended."

So out of touch.

Here is what Bernie Ecclestone told a reporter for CNN during an interview on Friday:

". . . The problems in Bahrain have nothing to do with Formula One. Quite the opposite – we have a lot of support. I mean, there are other issues in Bahrain, but nothing to do with us. We don't go into a country and interfere with the politics of the country . . ."

Asked if the teams had an misgivings, he replied:

"Not at all. We had a normal meeting about other matters. . . Nobody seemed to have any concerns."

The reporter asked if Bahrain had given assurances about safety and security.

"We haven’t asked anybody. We have an event in Bahrain that has been on the calendar since last October and the people that are the National Sporting Authority in that country are the only people that could change anything if they wanted to. They were the ones that applied for the date so if they didn’t want the race to take place they would apply for it to be removed."

So out of touch.

And then we have the lunacy at Long Beach.

Because of a series of circumstances, more than half the field - 14 drivers, in total - will be assessed 10-grid-position penalties following Saturday qualifying. So 26 cars are entered. As an example, and for the sake of argument, let's say our own James Hinchcliffe has a bad day and qualifies 26^th.

Now, where does he start?

His is one of the 14 engines that have been changed for this race. so he is assessed a 10-grid-position penalty.

But let’s say Helio Castroneves qualifies 17^th. Because his engine has been changed, he is also given a 10-grid-position penalty.

Does he then start behind Hinchcliffe? Does Hinchcliffe get pushed forward one position? And what of the cars that qualify 18^th, 19^th and so-on? What if they get 10-grid-position penalties? A tsunami of penalized race cars could find themselves lined up behind Hinchcliffe and he could be pushed forward 10 places.

See how stupid this whole thing is? And don't say it won't work that way. You watch what happens after qualifying when they try to sort this mess out.

Said an IndyCar official: "We've set the precedent and we have to stick with it."

So out of touch.

I betcha they make fun of this on Saturday Night Live.

IndyCar thinks it’s being responsible by sticking to its stupid rule. I have news: it’s making itself a laughing stock.

Autodate returns to Wheels and wheels.ca

As many of you have noticed, the popular summertime feature Autodate has been missing from the pages of Wheels.

No longer.

This blog today is to invite individuals and groups, car clubs, etc., who are planning non-profit events this year, to send notices of their plans, starting now, to wheels@thestar.ca

They should follow a format as much as possible — although we will fix them up. Essentially, the name of the event and the date should lead off the notice, followed by times and any other pertinent details. In short, the five Ws: What, When, Who, Where, Why.

Now, I want to stress that this notice service is for non-profit organizations and non-profit events. For instance, car washes in support of the Hospital for Sick Children are legal; car washes in support of the owner of the car wash are not.

We sometimes make exceptions: a raffle in support of a worthy cause that’s held at a for-profit event will sometimes qualify (I am the final judge), and that leads me to give the first plug of the Autodate season to this weekend’s Toronto Classic Car Auction at the International Centre in Mississauga.

A sixth generation 2002 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS “Intimidator” Coupe built at the GM plant in Oshawa in honour of Dale Earnhardt Sr. will be sold to the highest bidder (no reserve, either) and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the new urgent care unit at — ta-da — Sick Kids.

Moving right along, next Saturday night the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame, which comes under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Motorsport Heritage Foundation, will hold its annual Induction Gala at the On The Park banquet facility (Leslie and Eglinton in mid-town Toronto). Seven Canadian men who have made either significant contributions to Canadian motorsport or celebrated great personal achievement will be inducted.

Special guests are Michael Andretti, a former champion racer and now a team owner in the IZOD IndyCar Series, and Canadian IndyCar racer James Hinchcliffe of Oakville.

Andretti — who won seven Molson Indy races — will be inducted into the Hall in the “International” category was that created several years ago to honour non-Canadians for contributing to the growth, success and popularity of motorsport in this country. Hinchcliffe will appear as guest speaker.

Both, of course, are busy racing this weekend in Long Beach, Calif.

You may order tickets by emailing galatickets@cmhf.ca, calling 905 852 6764 or faxing to 905 852 7012. If you purchase a ticket as a result of reading this column, I’ll introduce you from the audience. I can do that; I'm the emcee.

Andretti and Hinchcliffe aside, I always have a wonderful time at these galas because it is just so great to come into contact with Canadians who have done wonderful things in national and international motorsport and often don’t receive the recognition they deserve. Here are quick squibs on the seven new members of the Hall:

Richard Foley Jr., of Montreal: Racing as Dick Foley, he was the first Canadian to make the field for what was the first Daytona 500 back in 1959. He had to race his way in — he didn’t qualify on speed — but so did Fireball Roberts, Buck Baker, Tim Flock and Curtis Turner so he was in pretty good company. Foley also triggered the biggest wreck in NASCAR history at Daytona in a sportsman-modified feature in 1960: 37 cars piled up but nobody was injured.

Rudy Bartling of Courtice , Ont: A sports car racer extraordinaire, Bartling made 17 starts at the 12 Hours of Sebring — the most by any Canadian — with several top 10 results. At the 24 Hours of Daytona, he made 12 starts with a best result of 12^th in 1973.

Paul S. Manson of Toronto: Manson participated as a navigator in literally hundreds of rallies across Canada and won the Canadian Rally Championship on several occasions. He was a regular competitor, and a top 10 or top five finisher, in the Shell 4000 Rally and the Canadian Winter Rally. He also wrote about the sport and contributed to a rally program on CBC radio.

G. Ben Docktor of Calgary: A stock car racer on the tracks of Alberta and Montana, he envisioned the construction of a comprehensive racing complex for the Calgary area. In 1987, Race City Speedway opened and included a half-mile oval speedway, a 2.1-mile road course and an NHRA-legal drag strip.

Greg Sewart of Halifax: Sewart won the MASCAR championship on several occasions and was always a force to be reckoned with in Maritime and U.S. stock car racing circles.

Robin Edwardes of in L’Orignal, Ont: Another champion rally navigator, Edwardes won numerous rallies, co-drove with some of the finest drivers of the day and was also an administrator. He served as vice-president of CASC in 1975-’77.

Norm Ellefson of Spokane, Wash: Ellefson was a champion supermodified and sprint car driver in Western Canada and the northwest U.S. in the 1960s. He won the Gold Cup race in Edmonton three times and the Daffodil Cup at Western Speedway in Victoria in 1967. He also raced stock cars.

See you at the banquet.

11 IndyCar drivers penalized for engine change

Precede to original blog:

Chevrolet is now changing the engines of all 11 Chevy drivers in advance of this weekend's Long Beach Grand Prix and, as a result, all 11 drivers will be penalized 10 grid positions for "unauthorized" engine changes.

If IndyCar now doesn't suspend the stupid rule that resulted in this insane decision, it will be the laughing stock of the sporting world.

Chevrolet decided to take action after examining the engine of James Hinchcliffe.

ORIGINAL BLOG

James Hinchcliffe of Oakville will be penalized 10 grid positions at the Grand Prix of Long Beach this weekend because his employer, Andretti Autosport, changed the engine in his car after it developed a problem during a test session earlier this week.

("Problem" is code for "blew up.")

Sebastien Bourdais will suffer the same fate, following on the heels of similar penalties being assessed previously against Alex Tagliani, Oriol Servia and Simon Pagenaud.

IndyCar, like Formula One and other progressive racing series around the world, has rules about when you can and cannot change engines. Fair enough. In the interests of conservation, the rules stipulate that the engines have to last a certain number of miles/kms or races before they can be exchanged for a fresh one. In the case of IndyCar, the first “authorized” engine change will be allowed after the Long Beach race this weekend.

Again, fair enough.

But IndyCar should look at this rule, because it’s not fair for the driver or the team to suffer if something goes wrong with an engine, which the team leases from the manufacturers/builders.

Whatever happened to Force Majeure?

After years of being a one-engine series (Honda), IndyCar opened involvement to other manufacturers this season and Chevrolet and Lotus joined up. But the series also changed the regulations. Since 1997, IndyCar had been running normally aspirated V8 power plants but for 2012 the participating manufacturers had to go back to the drawing board and come up with 2.4-liter turbocharged engines of up to six cylinders.

So IndyCar has brand new engines as well as two new manufacturers — and if somebody in the Front Office was paying attention, it might have occurred to them that perhaps this might just spell out trouble.

And it has. After years of problem-free engine running (Honda pretty much had things down pat in that department), there have now been five instances (in and/or after only two races and several tests) of engine failure involving all three manufacturers, which is not good.

So the problems appear to be with the engines and not with the teams or the drivers. Ergo, why not hit the engine manufacturers with fines — or just forget the rulebook until things settle down?

If teams are bending the rules to change engines (“the oil pressure seemed low, so we didn’t want to take a chance . . .”), then throw the rule book at them.

But if Hinchcliffe is just driving along one day and ker-pow! how come he’s the one who has to suffer?

New Jersey F1 race preparations well under way

While there continues to be hand-wringing over whether the much-publicized Circuit of the Americas near Austin, Tex., will be finished in time for the return of Formula One racing to the United States come November (I’m betting it is), there’s no doubt they’ll be ready for the one to follow in New Jersey next year.

Alex Howe, vice-president of communications for Global Strategy Group of New York, emailed me this photo the other day that shows construction already under way on garages and corporate suites for the June, 2013, Grand Prix of America at Port Imperial in Weehawken and West New York, N.J.

Howe advises that when construction is completed, the lower level will house the garages while the upper levels will contain luxury hospitality suits where guests will be able to see the pits, the front straight and, most important, the skyline of New York.

A 3.2-mile course on public roads – yup, just like Monaco’s – will start and finish at the Port Imperial ferry terminal and rise and fall 150 feet as it meanders close to existing residential neighbourhoods (I wonder how they’re going to like the noise . . .).

Much of the course will be on a road beside the Hudson River waterfront.

Organizers (the guy who invented the Yes Network – that stands for Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network – is behind the New Jersey race; one of the investors in Austin is the fellow who owns Patron Tequila, which is title sponsor of the American Le Mans Series) plan to repave the roads on which the cars will run and to erect concrete barriers and to put up grandstands to hold 75,000 people.

Otherwise, as is the case with the Honda Indy through the streets of the CNE in Toronto (July 6-8 this summer) or the Grand Prix of Canada on Ilse Notre-Dame in Montreal (June 8-10), the terrain will be as natural as natural can be.

Hey, Formula One and the city of New York. What an incredible combination!

One of the iconic events of North American racing, the Long Beach Grand Prix featuring the cars and stars of the IZOD IndyCar Series, takes places this weekend (be sure to check "George’s TV listings for race fans" on wheels.ca’s home page for channel and time) and a wonderful multimedia event is going to take place to publicize it.

Drivers Rubens Barrichello and Tony Kanaan will answer live questions from fans around the world and have the questions, answers and full conversation instantly translated using technology developed by Ortsbo, which translates emails (no cutting and pasting required) into more than 50 languages.

The moderator will be another driver, Canada’s own James Hinchcliffe, of Oakville.

Do you want to be a part of this? The Q & A will start at 7 p.m. Eastern on Saturday and you can register to watch in advance or join live at www.liveandglobal.com/indycar

Now, F1 is in Shanghai this weekend and, as mentioned, IndyCar is in California. NASCAR, on the other hand, is in two locations – Texas and North Carolina.

The Nationwide cars will be at Texas Motor Speedway Friday night and the Cup cars will race at night on Saturday. Meantime, the trucks are returning to Rockingham on Sunday afternoon and that race is generating some excitement because of the locale.

The facility, situated in the Sandhills of North Carolina, held its last NASCAR Sprint Cup Series event in February 2004 and pretty much sat there until former racer Andy Hillenburg purchased it in 2007.

Under Hillenburg, racing returned to "The Rock," and last September, NASCAR announced its plan to head back to the one-mile speedway with the Camping World Truck Series (in which J.R. Fitzpatrick of Cambridge, Ont., has had a couple of good runs so far this season).

The inference is that if Rockingham does a good job with the truck race, it might - might - land a Nationwide or Cup race sometime down the line. (Remember, Rockingham was an early-season stop on the Cup circuit for years and years and only lost its place because NASCAR wanted to run races in the southwest when it was cold in the east - and it was sometimes freezing in the Carolinas in March.)

Said Speed TV reporter Ray Dunlap (and, frankly, I can’t figure out why the various networks don’t make better use of this guy in other series, because he does an excellent job in the pits):

"There truly is a great heritage at Rockingham. The drivers are even more excited to get the race started than the media or fans. The surrounding area was hit hard by the loss of Sprint Cup racing, so I think this will be a big boost to the area with the fans travelling in from Raleigh, Charlotte and the Triad."

And me, travelling to my couch, in my Family Room, in Mississauga, Ont., to be there in spirit.

F1 should cancel Bahrain; why can't racers be more like golfers?

Short takes after a long Easter holiday weekend:

Formula One returns to the streets of Shanghai next weekend but all anybody will be talking about is the race that comes a week later, the Grand Prix of Bahrain.

Once again there is a race scheduled and once again there is serious unrest on the island in the Persian Gulf of the type that led to the cancellation of the event a year ago: demonstrators being killed (at last count, more than 40), the military being used to stifle dissent and the incarceration of hundreds of protesters including one man who was sentenced to life in prison.

He has been on a hunger strike for nearly 60 days and there are fears he may die.

Bernie Ecclestone met in London (the perfect place to get a grip on the actual situation, don’t you think?) with Bahrain GP organizers last week and told reporters later that there are "no worries, the race will be held."

No worries?

Hopefully, someone close to Ecclestone, or to FIA chief Jean Todt, will help them come to their senses and call it off again.

F1 cannot be seen to aggravate a situation so that more people are killed. F1 cannot put its own people – drivers, team personnel, FIA employees – in danger. F1 has to protect its sponsors, who could unwittingly find themselves on the wrong side of the world opinion fence.

F1 has to stay out of Bahrain and if it doesn’t, it will be making a huge mistake.

Who names their kid "Bubba?"

I was wondering this as I watched the last few holes of the Masters on Sunday, which was won by Bubba Watson. The other thing I was wondering about is how come professional golf is as commercially-driven and commerically oriented as auto racing and yet I never hear a professional golfer thank his sponsors for helping him win a golf tournament.

For instance, Phil Mickelsen was interviewed while TV was killing time before the extra-holes playoff. He wore a visor that had K.P.M.G. written on it, a shirt that had the Barclays logo on it, the word Callaway on his golf bag could be seen a mile away and yet he didn’t mention any of them in the interview, which was all about how he screwed up out on the course and didn’t win the Masters.

Contrast that with any racing driver in Victory Lane who can’t wait to thank each and every one of his team’s sponsors, which is so hokey and boring that your eyes immediately glaze over and you wonder how it all started?

Give me the golfers over the car racers any day when it comes to sophisticated face time on TV.

Once upon a time, you really had to know what you were doing when you applied to drive a racing car at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

In fact, when you were just a wet-behind-the-ears wannabe Indy car driver, they often wouldn’t even let you into the place, never mind get into a car, and you can ask legends like Parnelli Jones and A.J. Foyt if you don’t believe me.

The "four phase (speed)" test, carried out under the watchful eyes of veteran drivers, saw more than a few future champions sent away to "get more experience" before they would be granted the privilege of trying to qualify a car for the "500." Guys like Eddie Sachs and Don Branson were made to eat crow before going on to get their first big chance.

Then came the rear-engine revolution, which brought the "sporty car" set to the Speedway, and the era of ride-buying began. All sorts of people who had absolutely no business being in racing cars at Indianapolis were not only passing the test but qualifying for the big race too (they used to flunk them in the old days, but not anymore).

Remember the Whittington brothers, Don, Dale and Bill, who all made the field in 1982 (and then went to jail for drug smuggling)? And Patrick Bedard, a columnist for Car & Driver magazine, who qualified in 1984 (and then managed to survive an absolutely God-awful wreck, which convinced him to stop being so foolish)?

As a result, all sorts of people became convinced that Indy was easy. Remember Phillipe Gache? Neither do I, but he made it into the Indy 500. Lynn St. James made it in one year and Bobby Rahal didn’t. Figure that one out. I could go on.

Now Jean Alesi is going to try. Alesi was a Formula One driver who drove for six teams in a 12-year career that ended in 2001. He was very popular with the fans, worked hard, was very cooperative with the media and won exactly one race – Montreal in 1995.

He is 47 and is going to drive in the Indy 500 for Lotus, he says.

It has been amusing for me, over the years, to listen to the drivers in a glamour-puss class like – say – Indy cars say things like: "Yes, when I finish with the open-wheel cars, I think I’ll go to NASCAR." And they said things like that because, at the time, guys like Richard Petty were still racing when they were in their fifties and a lot of them were balding and had pot-bellies, like Benny Parsons. So how hard could it be?

But while they were waiting to "retire" to NASCAR, NASCAR itself was changing and as a lot of single-seat drivers have found out since, stock car racing is not a walk in the park and, in fact, a lot of them have had their butts kicked.

Indy car racing is enjoying something of a renaissance (more drivers are being paid than are paying) and, as Rubens Barrichello is finding out, it’s tougher than it looks from the outside.

So, it's tough out there. And Indianapolis can rise up and bite you, too, as Nelson Piquet Sr. found out in 1992 when he lost control and went into a concrete wall at very high speed, breaking most of the bones in his feet and ankles.

Three-time world champion Piquet found out the hard way. One-race Alesi should take note.

Barrichello to replace Massa at Ferrari?

The Twitterverse was going crazy this week with speculation that Felipe Massa will soon be out at Ferrari and replaced by — are you ready? — Rubens Barrichello.

If that’s not all, Jean Alesi confirmed that he will — indeed — enter the Indianapolis 500 this year and do it in a car powered by a Lotus engine and entered by Newman-Haas Racing.

Now, I am the first to admit that stranger things have happened. But let’s take a closer look.

Alesi first.

The Indianapolis Star reported last week that the deal for Alesi to race at Indy in a car entered by Keith Wiggins’ HVM Racing (which runs Simona de Silvestro in the IZOD IndyCar Series) was off because, according to Wiggins, there wasn’t enough money.

IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard immediately countered that Alesi would — indeed — be racing at Indianapolis, although he was a little vague on specifics.

There then followed a story on the Autosport website that quoted Alesi as saying he would go to Indy with Newman-Haas Racing. Newman-Haas, of course, announced late last year that it wouldn’t contest the 2012 IndyCar season because it didn’t have the money. That threw James Hinchcliffe and Oriol Servia out of work, although they’ve both since bounced back.

Now, I suppose Newman-Haas could run a car at Indy. And I suppose Lotus could build an engine for Alesi’s car (although they’ve been having trouble building enough of them to power the teams they’re already contracted to and none other than Roger Penske has suggested they are not long for the racing business). And I suppose the 47-year-old Alesi, who’s been out of open wheel racing for years, might be able to get up to speed to race at Indy (although it’s a lot harder than it looks).

But there are an awful lot of “I supposes” in there, aren’t there?

I think, frankly, that this is just a lot of smoke to cover up the fact that Lotus is in serious trouble as an engine builder and that IndyCar made a mistake by deciding to include it with Honda and Chevrolet.

Re: Barrichello and Massa.

Why would Ferrari give the boot to an under-achieving Brazilian in order to replace him with another Brazilian who would also under-achieve?

If Massa has to go, I can’t see Ferrari hiring Barrichello — can you? Wouldn’t it be better to make a deal now for Sergio Perez and move another young Ferrari development driver into the Sauber program?

But, as I said, stranger things have happened.

Canada's Robert Wickens gets Mercedes seat

ROBERT WICKENS OF CANADA (TOP) WAS NAMED TO THE MERCEDES-BENZ JUNIOR TEAM TO RACE IN THE GERMAN TOURING CAR CHAMPIONSHIP (DTM). HE JOINS ROBERTO MERHI AND CHRISTIAN VIETORIS IN THE TEAM.

Wonderful news from Germany this morning.

Robert Wickens, the only Canadian racing driver to hold a Superlicence that would allow him to race in Formula One, has been signed to drive for the new Mercedes-Benz Junior Team in the German Touring Car Championship (DTM) in 2012.

And the team will be coached by seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher.

Wickens has been a rising star in the world of motorsport from almost the moment he stepped into a racing go-kart. A move into single-seaters brought a Formula BMW-USA championship and sponsorship/guidance from Red Bull Racing.

He was Rookie of the Year in the old Champ Car Atlantic Series and then moved to Europe where he finished second in successive Formula 2 and GP3 championships before winning the World Series by Renault Formula 3/5 title in 2011.

Although his move to the DTM was an open secret, Wickens was unable to publicly confirm (or deny) it untiul the team made an announcement, which came today.

Wickens is one of three young drivers who will be given every opportunity to show their stuff with the carrot of an F1 ride at the end of the stick.

It’s interesting that Schumacher will coach the team as he might very well select the driver to succeed him at Mercedes F1 when he retires.

Following is the media release Mercedes-Benz sent out this morning:

Mercedes-Benz is expanding its successful young driver program in the 2012 season with a junior team for the German Touring Car Masters (DTM). Roberto Merhi (Spain, 20, Junge Sterne Mercedes AMG C-Coupé, Persson Motorsport), Christian Vietoris (Germany, 23, Mercedes-Benz Bank AMG C-Coupé, HWA) and Robert Wickens (Canada, 22, stern Mercedes AMG C-Coupé, Mücke Motorsport) will be contesting the world's most popular touring car series behind the wheel of a DTM Mercedes AMG C-Coupé as members of the Mercedes-Benz Junior Team.

 

Serving as role model and mentor to the Junior Team will be Michael Schumacher. The veteran Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula 1 driver will bring all his experience to bear from seven world championship titles and 91 Grand Prix victories.

Schumacher himself also benefited from the Mercedes-Benz program in the years 1990 and 1991, when he lined up alongside Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Karl Wendlinger with Sauber Mercedes in the Sports Prototype Championship.

Schumacher, Frentzen (156 Grand Prix starts, 3 wins, 1997 World Championship runner-up) and Wendlinger (41 Grand Prix starts) all succeeded in making the step up to Formula One.

Christian Vietoris enters his second DTM season in 2012. The 23-year-old finished his rookie season on four points, his best race result being fifth place in the race at Oschersleben.

Roberto Merhi and Robert Wickens are both about to make their DTM debut this season.

Merhi has been a member of the Mercedes-Benz young drivers program since 2008, winning the 2011 Formula 3 Euro Series title in a Dallara-Mercedes as well as the first-ever FIA Formula 3 International Trophy.

As a reward for this success, he was invited to test drive the new DTM Mercedes AMG C-Coupé at the end of the 2011 season.

Wickens won the 2011 Formula Renault 3.5 World Series championship, posting five victories along the way. Later that same year, he gained his first experience of Formula One in a series of test drives for Marussia Virgin Racing and Lotus Renault GP.

Encouraging young talent in motorsport has a long tradition at Mercedes-Benz. Since the inaugural Formula 3 Euro Series in 2003, 13 drivers have made the breakthrough to Formula One after learning their trade with a Mercedes-Benz Formula 3 engine.

One-third of the Formula One grid for the 2012 season started out in Formula 3 with a Mercedes-Benz engine — reigning world champion Sebastian Vettel and former champion Lewis Hamilton, 2010 DTM Champion Paul Di Resta, Kamui Kobayashi, Romain Grosjean, Nico Hülkenberg, Daniel Ricciardo and Bruno Senna.

Said Wickens (in the release): “The DTM is a fantastic series. You're competing against top-notch drivers. I'm proud that Mercedes-Benz are giving me the chance to show what I am capable of in this environment in the Junior Team. My main aim will be to finish every race and to deliver decent performances.”

Said Schumacher: “I remember clearly the early stages of my career, and what I gained from my time in the Mercedes-Benz Junior Team — both on and off the track. It taught me the best way of working with the engineers and helped me build a professional relationship to the media.

“I'm excited to see how Christian, Roberto and Robert develop, they're certainly going to have a great time, and I enjoyed meeting them in Barcelona to offer a few tips from my own experience. Being selected as a member of the Mercedes-Benz Junior Team is really something to be proud of.

“I will be following the performances of the DTM juniors closely and wish them lots of success.”

 Said Norbert Haug, Vice-President Mercedes-Benz Motorsport:  “Here at Mercedes-Benz, we have a tradition of nurturing promising young drivers and talent-spotting the stars of tomorrow that goes back almost as far as the earliest Mercedes-built racing cars.

“In 2012, we are sending three highly gifted 20-somethings into the fray as our DTM Junior Team: Roberto Merhi, the reigning Formula 3 Euro Series champion; Christian Vietoris, a GP2 champion who already has experience of DTM racing; and Robert Wickens who won the Renault World Series. All three of them are keen to seize this wonderful opportunity.

“And they have excellent role models in Michael Schumacher, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Karl Wendlinger, the successful trio who made up the Mercedes Junior Team in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and who have still not finished making motor racing history.

“Roberto, Christian and Robert have a lot to learn, but that will not be a problem, as they are all three avid learners.”

The first race of the 11-race DTM season will take place at Hockenheim on April 29.

Power in IndyCar, Newman in NASCAR no April Fools

HINCHCLIFFE SIXTH IN ALABAMA INDY CAR RACE

There were a couple of good April Fool jokes around Sunday.

For instance, Google, which has been testing a self-driving car in California for several years now, announced that its Google Racing team would enter a self-driving race car in NASCAR races by the middle of next season.

In a wonderful video, Jeff Gordon welcomes the experiment. “I’ve been out here for 20 years,” he said  with a straight face, “and I need a vacation. . . . Thank God for technology.”

You can watch the video here

The Weather Network had a good one on Canada geese kidnapping a student at the University of Waterloo but the one I liked best concerned the proposed Canadian Motor Speedway in Fort Erie.

This email landed in my in-box at mid-morning Sunday:

FORT ERIE SPEEDWAY GETS GREEN FLAG

Fort Erie Economic Development and officials from Canadian MotorSpeedway International announced today that the planned speedway development in Fort Erie will commence construction immediately at the site of the current Fort Erie horse racing track.

Following the news that the Fort Erie race track will lose its slots from the OLG and face the loss of hundreds of jobs, the town and CMSI representatives are wasting no time with re-construction and paving over of the horse track already beginning late Saturday night.

MORE

Well, I thought it was funny. . .

Not so funny is the situation four IZOD IndyCar Series teams are facing. They are the teams that  signed up to run Lotus racing engines and they are hanging on by a thread.

Sebastien Bourdais, who finished ninth in Sunday’s second race of the season at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, which was won by Will Power with Scott Dixon second and Helio Castroneves third (full results here), has a Lotus engine in his car, but no spare.

Ditto Katherine Legge, Oriol Servia, Simona de Silvestro and Canadian Alex Tagliani (who didn’t complete even one lap of Sunday’s race before his engine expired).

As a result, none of those drivers or their teams will be able to attend the test session at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway this week that was arranged especially to test new engines and the new Dallara chassis at the site of the most important race on the IndyCar calendar, the Indianapolis 500, that will take place at the end of May.

What is particularly worrying is that never mind the teams that already have Lotus engines and no spares because they will probably be able to muddle through. But what will Indy-only teams do for power plants?  Where will the six or seven cars needed to fill out the traditional 33-car field get engines?

Roger Penske mused a couple of weeks ago that the cars currently using Lotus engines will have to switch to Honda or Chevy engines if they simply want to make it through to the end of the season.

Lotus immediately pooh-poohed that, but the fact of the matter is that Roger Penske is rarely wrong and if I had to make a choice between what an engine manufacturer on very shaky ground says and what Roger Penske says, guess who I’m going with?

And if Penske’s correct (and I think he is), Honda and Chevy will be busy making enough engines to pacify teams already in the series, never mind the one-race-a-year-crowd.

So there’s a distinct possibility there could be fewer than 33 cars in the 2012 Indy 500, which would not be the end of the world but, on the other hand, would not look good and would send out a message the series wouldn’t want.

I was talking the other day to a man whose son is employed by a team in IndyCar and Dad was saying his kid is not impressed with the series’ leadership.

I look at the engine situation and I have to agree with him. How could this have happened?

What makes it worse is that CEO Randy Bernard was quoted on the IndyCar website Sunday as saying he expects 34 car-and-driver combinations to enter the “500,” including ex-F1 driver Jean Alesi.

But only hours before, HVM Racing principal Keith Wiggins told the Indianapolis Star that the deal with Alesi was off because there wasn’t enough money to make it work.

Huh?
 
Meantime, Oakville’s James Hinchcliffe qualified well and finished well – although his finish wasn’t as good as his qualifying.

The Sunoco Rookie-of-the-Year in 2011 turned the second-fastest time Saturday to sit beside pole-winner Castroneves. It was his first front-row start in the big leagues.

He ran most of the race in fourth place – where he finished the season-opener last weekend at St. Petersburg – but on the last restart, he was shuffled from fourth back to sixth, where he stayed until the checkers.

Give him some time, though. He’s going to win one of these races.

The other Canadian, Tagliani, was very disappointed to suffer engine trouble – again.

“We took the green flag, went into turn one and the engine just died,” he said. “It seems to be a pretty heavy mechanical failure what what I understand. . . I think our car was decent, but we’re having a lot of problems right now with the engine.”

His boss, Bryan Herta, was equally unhappy: “Everyone is working very hard to earn results and we are unhappy that we suffered another engine issue two weekends running.”

Hmmm.

Two other observations before we move on:

– Scott Dixon is racing wonderfully for Chip Ganassi (he might have won that Alabama round if he hadn’t suffered a slight misfortune on his final pit stop) while teammate Dario Franchitti is struggling. I wonder why?

– In Winner’s Circle, Will Power leaped frontwards high off the side of his race car to land somewhat unsteadily. NASCAR’s Carl Edwards does a backflip off his car when he wins and is pretty much solid as a rock when he hits the ground (considering he's coming in backwards). Maybe Power should just step out of his car and forget the gymnastics because, compared to Edwards – well, there’s no comparison.

Over in NASCARland, Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon were running one-two in the final laps of the Sprint Cup race at Martinsville when David Reutimann suffered mechanical failure and had to stop on the speedway, bringing out a yellow.

NASCAR actually hauled Reutimann and car owner Tommy Baldwin into “the trailer” afterwards to make sure there hadn’t been any hanky panky (there wasn’t) but just about everybody except the two front-runners made a pit stop for fresh rubber before what was supposed to be the final restart.

So they waved the green flag and Clint Bowyer dive-bombed (there’s no other word for it) down the inside of Gordon going into Turn One and, before you could blink, Gordon was sideways and that turned Johnson around and they both crashed, allowing Ryan Newman to sneak past, as did A.J. Allmendinger, to win the race with Allmendinger second and Dale Earnhardt Jr. third (full results here).

It was a typical, tight, short-track stock car race with lots of bumping and tradin’ paint and crashing (just the sort of thing they want more of at Bristol, where they’ve decided to make some changes to that speedway to improve the racing - translation: generate more crashing).

Reutimann was beside himself with embarrassment, because he was getting it in the ear from the other drivers. Baldwin was calmer, suggesting the Florida driver tried to stay out on the speedway as long as he could to gain enough points so that his car, No. 10, could stay inside the top 35 in owner points and be locked into upcoming races.

It seems that the No. 10 is the car Danica Patrick drives when she makes her occasional appearances in Sprint Cup races and they’re now worried she won’t be able to make it into the races without that crutch – which I think is silly: Danica can go fast in a race car and will be able to qualify on her own.

In fact, I think it will be better for her to show she's got the Right Stuff rather than having to rely on a free pass.

There’s no NASCAR racing next weekend, as it’s Easter, and the IndyCars don’t race until two weeks from now at Long Beach and F1 is quiet as well.

What ever will we all do?

Other weekend racing:

Richard Westbrook and Antonio Garcia, driving a Corvette Daytona Prototype, won the Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series race at Barber Motorsports Park on Saturday.

Sylvain Tremblay (who's originally from Montreal) and Jonathan Bomarito won the GT class in a Mazda RX-8, edging out the No. 69  AIM Autosport of Woodbridge Ferrari 458 Italia driven by Emil Assentato and Jeff Segal, which finished 10th overall.

“Barber is always a difficult track to get a good setup and on Friday we found a combination that really worked well,” said AIM team principal and race engineer Ian Willis. “Emil and Jeff both drove to the limit to achieve this tremendous result.”

The AIM Ferrari will be racing again in the Grand Prix of Miami April 27-29.

Paul Dalla Lana of Toronto co-drove to a 13th-place finish overall and fifth in the GT class.

In the Continental Tire race at Barber, Canadians who finished included:

Scott Maxwell of Toronto co-drove a Multimatic Motorsports Aston Martin Vantage to a second-place finish overall in the GS class. David Empringham of Toronto was fifth in GS. Ashley McCalmont of Ancaster was tenth in GS. Michael Valiante of Vancouver was 37th overall and 23rd in the ST class. Dalla Lana was classified 55th overall and 20th in GS. The top finishing Compass360 Racing Team of Toronto car was 21st overall and seventh in the ST class.

Finally, Ryan Villopoto of Minneola, Fla., who won the AMA Supercross event at Rogers Centre in Toronto last weekend, wrapped up the 2012 Supercross Championship this weekend by winning the event in Houston, Tex.

It’s the earliest that a rider has ever wrapped up a Supercross title. Villopoto said that's fine with him because now he can start preparing earlier for the outdoor motocross season.