Merry Christmas to all race fans

To the people who read this blog, I wish you all - critics and friends alike - a very Merry Christmas and a great 2013.

With luck, we can look forward to great races and racing in Formula One, NASCAR, IndyCar and sports cars (not to forget the dragsters and the short tracks), as was the case in 2012.

Talking about sports cars, the announcement everybody has been waiting for following the sale of the ALMS to the NASCAR-owned Grand-Am Series will come on Jan. 4 in Daytona Beach when the class structure will be unveiled and explained.

Fingers crossed on that one.

In a day or two (it is the holidays, after all) I'll post a roundup, with comments, of all the important racing news that's relatively recent.

I'll also discuss the difficulty of coming up with a definitive Top Ten Stories of the Year list.

Meantime, enjoy the day. Joy to the World.

Oh, before I go, in case any of you missed my annual Christmas story that was published last weekend in Toronto Star Wheels, entitled When Murphy met Baby (it's about a taxi driver who hooks up with a hoodlum for a drive to Rochester), here's the link.

I think you'll like it. 

- Norris McDonald

Comments

[Dwayne D]

Merry christmas Noris, If the Prototypes are not state of the art spare no cost racing machines I'll be very pissed!

[David White]

Merry Christmas Norris to you and family. Keep up the great work!

[K.R.B.]

I assume the merged series in 2014 will likely allow most of the existing classes, maybe with some method to equalize performance. But I wonder if there's much of a future for sports prototypes beyond the next two or three years. They're either too expensive (LMP1) to attract a reasonable number of entrants, or a bland cost-controlled class of spec racing machines that do not interest most racing fans and have little or no connection to auto manufacturers. The FIA and ACO are supposedly devising a single GT class for 2015 to combine the best aspects of the present GTE and GT3, so presumably it could also be adopted in North America. If we will get to see cars like the McLaren MP4-12C, Lamborghini Gallardo, Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, Ferrari 458, etc., that were in the FIA GT series this year, then it wouldn't bother me if prototypes disappeared.