In warm sunshine and in front of a monster crowd, Louise-Phillipe Dumoulin of Trois-Rivieres, Que., won the Vortex Brake Pads 200 at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park on Sunday.
Jeff Lapcevich of Grimsby was second and Jason Hathaway of Dutton, Ont., was third in the opening race of the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series stock car racing season.
Defending champion D.J. Kennington of St. Thomas finished fourth and Robin Buck of Campbellville was fifth. The rest of the Top Ten: Kerry Micks of Mt. Albert, Ty Dillon of Charlotte, N.C. (a Camping World Truck Series regular doing reconnaisance for the truck race at CTMP on Labour Day weekend), Noel Dowler of Sherwood Park, Alta., Trevor Seibert of Williams Lake, B.C., and Brad Graham of Glencoe, Ont.
It was the first NASCAR Canada victory for Dumoulin, who also races sports cars (ALMS and Rolex Grand Am).
Two of the race favourites were eliminated early in the race. Pole-sitter J.R. Fitzpatrick of Cambridge dropped out with a broken drive shaft and two-time Canadian Tire champion Scott Steckly of Milverton crashed. He wasn't injured but his trip into the tire wall in Turn Three was spectacular.
Steckly said he might have hit some oil, he wasn't sure, but that "I lost the front" end and couldn't help hitting the tires.
"It's awful (the crash)," he said. "I feel badly for my crew, who worked so hard, and for all my sponsors, particularly Canadian Tire."
Dumoulin, a driving coach in his "off hours," said he was delighted to have won. He finished fifth a year ago in this race.
"The sponsors gave us a great program over the winter," he said, adding he likes racing at Old Mosport and has wonderful memories of competing at the Bowmanville-area circuit years ago when he raced in Formula 1600.
He said his plan was to save his car - prepared for him by Steckly, by the way - for the end of the race, to save his brakes and to keep calm.
Asked about the calibre of competition in the Canadian Tire series, Dumoulin said it was second to none, pointing out that "ex-F1 guys" (Max Papis) and "old IRL guys" (Alex Tagliani) have raced in the series and haven't dominated.
Lapcevich said he'd wanted to do well to honour the memory of his father, Joe Lapcevich, who died recently. "The support of family, friends and sponsors" was amazing, he said.
He said he'd tried to rattle Dumoulin in the last few laps but had wound up rattling himself instead. "I overshot Turn One," and by the time he regained controlf of his car, Dumoulin was too far in front to catch.
Hathaway, who has entered all 76 races since NASCAR purchased the old CASCAR series from founder Tony Novotny and rebranded it the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series, scored his best career finish. He was eighth here a year ago.
Oh, by the way, just to get all of the proper sponsor plugs in: the name of the race, the series and the locale, officially, is:
The Pinty’s presents the Vortex Brake Pads 200; the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series presented by Mobil 1; Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.
OTHER RACING
The Ultra 94 Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge Canada by Michelin held its second race of the weekend. David Ostella of Maple, who raced in Indy Lights in recent years, took the checkered flag in Platinum Cup over Saturday’s race winner Spencer Pigot. For the second straight day, Tim Sanderson was the victor in Gold Cup.
Sunday's racing action also saw the Canadian Touring Car Championship complete their weekend doubleheader. Scott Nichol took the win in Super Touring over Benjamin Distaulo. Michel Sallenbach was first in the Touring Class and Karl Wittmer took the victory in B-Spec.
In Canadian Supercar, Frank Fusillo went to the top step of the podium in the S1 class over Guy Leclerc. Simon Dion-Viens was first in S2.
The final race of the weekend saw Florida native Doug Peterson win the SCCCA Trans-Am Series race over defending Series champion Tony Ave.
Jimmie Johnson won the NASCAR All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway Saturday night, or Sunday morning - I'm not sure which. It was the witching hour, in any event. Johnson, who won the non-points, gimmicky event for the fourth time, took home a cheque totalling more than $1 million.
Meantime, at Brands Hatch in England, Canadian driver Robbie Wickens finished a career-best third in the German Touring Car Series (DTM) race there. Wickens joined another Canadian, Quebec driver Bruno Spengler, on the podium. Spengler finished second behind winner Mike Rockenfeller. Wickens was in a Mercedes, Spengler in a BMW and Rockenfeller in an Audi. Watch the video here.
Said Wickens: "This is my first podium in the DTM and, what's more, it comes after starting from 13th on the grid at Brands Hatch where overtaking is notoriously difficult. I certainly wasn't counting on that before the race. My target was just to finish in the points.
"To make that happen, I knew I would have to get off to a good start and overtake the drivers on the prime tires. This strategy worked well. I was pleasantly surprised by my race pace and I was even able to go past drivers on options when I was on primes. The middle stint went perfectly for me. I had two excellent pit stops and was able to control my part of the race right through to the end.
"Afterwards, I was in the middle of an interview when I was told to hurry along to the podium. So after a physically draining 98-lap race, I had to run the full length of the pit lane to the podium ceremony. But it was well worthwhile. It was a great feeling to taste champagne for the first time in my DTM career."
So you leave Canadian Tire Motorsports Park, and you go out for dinner and then you stop off with the Designated Driver and have a little party with friends and you arrive home to find out that there is a surprise driver on pole at Indianapolis and half of the race fans in Toronto are browned off at Sportsnet.
Let's begin with Indy qualifying.
Ed Carpenter, stepson of Indy Racing League founder Tony George and a racer who came up the old-fashioned way through midgets, sprint cars and the Silver Crown dirt champ cars, won the pole Saturday for next weekend's 97th Indianapolis 500.
Will Power and Ryan Hunter-Reay, who had pretty much set the pace leading up to today's Fast Nine final qualifying sprint, wound up sixth and seventh, respectively.
Canadians James Hinchcliffe of Oakville and Alex Tagliani of Montreal qualified ninth and 11th.
Rookie Carlos Munoz, an Indy Lights racer who brought the money for a crack at Indianapolis, will start second while his teammate, Marco Andretti will go off third. E.J. Viso is fourth (Munoz, Andretti, Viso, Hunter-Reay and Hinchcliffe all race for Andretti Motorsport, meaning all of the team's cars made it into final qualifying) and A.J. Allmendinger was fifth and fastest of the Team Penske cars.
Twenty-four cars qualified. Ten drivers will try Sunday for the remaining nine places.
By the way, the first 10 cars were powered by Chevrolet. Tagliani was the fastest Honda car in 11th.
As mentioned, Sportsnet - apparently - dropped the ball big-time. It took over televising the IZOD IndyCar Series this season from TSN. Although I missed the frustration, I heard from a bunch of my readers who were not happy that there was no coverage of the run for the pole late in the day.
Wrote one: "I have no idea if the final shootout for pole was even televised. And if so, why Sportsnet failed to show it, as promised. I channel surfed all the Rogers channels between 6 and 7 p.m. In fact they didn’t say anything at all, and not a peep on any of their ‘tickers.’ Not that it was further postponed due to rain, or who actually won. Nothing."
Wrote another: "Early coverage was on The Score. But nothing in the late afternoon or early evening. NBC also broke away for Preakness coverage and only showed final few of top 9. IndyCar switched to live streaming on top 9 but couldn't get their act together to in time to show Hinch. There is no excuse for no Canadian coverage. Twitter is lit up with angry viewers on both sides of the border about what happened today."
I, personally, have never been in favour of protectionism of any kind. Keeping ESPN and the NBC Sports Network and other U.S. all-sports channels out of Canada in order to protect TSN and Sportsnet results in nonsense like this.
I've said it time and again, they wouldn't dare do this to baseball fans, or hockey fans, or any kind of fans other than race fans.
Race fans battled back, of course, in the good old days of grey market satellite television where a post office box address in Niagara Falls, N.Y., got you direct access to complete coverage of things like Indy 500 time trials on American stations.
I'm afraid as long as racing sells itself to TV networks, we'll just have to continue putting up with the insults. But if they live-stream all of Indy - practice and qualifying from the first moment each day to the last, even for a fee - I, for one, would say sayonara to television.
EARLIER
J.R. Fitzpatrick today stormed to pole position for Sunday's NASCAR Canadian Tire Series' Pinty's presents the Vortex Brake Pads 200, the opening race of the 2013 season and the feature event of the annual Victoria Day Weekend Speedfest.
And with a time of one minute, 23.286 seconds, the Cambridge speedster set a new track record for stock cars at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, formerly Mosport, north of Bowmanville.
Louis-Phillippe Dumoulin of Trois-Rivieres, Que., will start second on Sunday and Scott Steckly of Milverton, a former series champion, will start third.
Nearly 30 cars from across the country will take the green flag in the race scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Sunday. The race will be telecast by CTV.
In other racing, Guy Leclerc won the opening race of the Supercar season, Scott Nicol was first in the opening race of the Canadian Touring Car Series season and Spencer Pigot won the first race of the Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge Canada series.
In SCCA Pro Racing Trans-Am, Simon Gregg won the pole and set a new track record with a time of 1:15.614. Defending Series champion Tony Ave was second.
EARLIER
Pole day qualifying is now under way at Indianapolis with Will Power of Team Penske in first place at the moment. His lap of 228.844 miles an hour just nipped defending series champion Ryan Hunter-Reay's 228.282 mph.
Others quick out of the box today - qualifying was held up by rain - were Indy Lights driver Carlos Munoz (third) and oval specialist Ed Carpenter (fifth). Canadians James Hinchcliffe of Oakville and Alex Tagliani of Montreal were both in the top ten.
Once upon a time, the fastest driver on the first day of time trials won the pole with the field filled up and bumping taking place on other qualifying days. Nowadays, there are eliminations and fasts nines and fast sixes and it's all very confusing. Sometime around 7 o'clock tonight, the pole winner will be decided and the world will know - unless the world will have moved on, it being 7 o'clock on Saturday night and all.
Two observations. The Indy 500 might continue to be the Greatest Spectacle in Racing but no longer can they say the 33 best racing drivers in the world are in the race. Why?
The fact that Munoz is third fastest means that just about anybody can drive these cars. Maybe not race them, but certainly drive them. That he is doing this as a rookie, in his first IZOD IndyCar Series race that also happens to be the Indy 500, the world's most famous race, is close to being ridiculous. Mario Andretti, or A.J. Foyt, or Ayrton Senna, this kid is not.
And Katherine Legge has now purchased herself a seat in another one of the cars entered by Sam Schmidt (those cars all go to the highest bidder). I have said all I will ever say about Katherine Legge, so let's leave it at this: I'm less than impressed.
EARLIER
Pole day qualifying at Indianapolis is on hold as there is rain in the area.
And the track at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park is quiet because everybody is eating lunch.
Except some of us.
When something happens somewhere, you'll read about it here.
Meantime, Donnie Schatz passed Greg Hodnett on the last lap at Pennsylvania's Williams Grove Speedway Friday night to win the World of Outlaws sprint car feature. The Outlaws, of course, will make a Canadian swing in July and race at Ohsweken Speedway near Brantford and Cornwall Speedway as well as at tracks in Quebec and Alberta. . . .Dale Darland won the USAC Sprint Car Series' Larry Rice Classic at Bloomington Speedway Friday night. Many of the USAC stars will be in action at O'Reilly Raceway Park outside Indianapolis tonight (Saturday) for a Champ Car Silver Crown event, weather permitting. It's also USAC Hall of Fame weekend and a bunch of oldies but goodies guys like Bobby Unser and Jack Hewitt will be enshrined. For those who's forgotten, or are too young to remember, the U.S. Auto Club used to be the big dog of sanctioning bodies and ran racing, including the Indy 500, with an iron fist. . . . At Brands Hatch in England, where the German Touring Car Series (DTM) is running this weekend, Robert Wickens of Guelph and Toronto qualified 14th for Sunday's feature event. Defending champion Bruno Spengler of Quebec will go off fifth. . . . At Old Mosport, the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series cars are on track. Lunch is over. Time to go.
EARLIER
It’s Pole Day at Indianapolis, and the Victoria Day Weekend Speedfest is in full swing at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park (hey – 28 entries in the Trans-Am! Big Iron is back!).
So let’s get caught up before all hell breaks loose on Saturday.
– Talking about hell breaking loose, NASCAR Camping World Truck Series owner/driver Jennifer Joe Cobb (pictured) has accused her former Nationwide Series team manager Mike Harmon of stealing her nearly $300,000 transporter. Cobb is also involved in litigation with her former business partner, David Novak, over who really owns most of the equipment Cobb uses to race.
It is a tangled web.
– Meantime, Kyle Busch started the NASCAR All-Star Weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway off with a bang Friday night by winning the Camping World Truck Series’ North Carolina Education Lottery 200 (talk about a mouthful!).
Brendan Gaughan finished second and Max Gresham was third.
Three of the Camping World series regulars who visited CTMP recently for a one-truck test conducted by driver Nelson Piquet Jr. were in that race Friday night. Defending champion James Beushcher was sixth, Miguel Paludo – who led for a good stretch – finished seventh and Jeb Burton was 13th.
Burton, incidentally, is the son of retired NASCAR Cup star, and Daytona 500 winner, Ward Burton. Jeb started from pole Friday night – his third in five starts this season – but didn’t have the horses to stay there.
The Camping Wordl Truck series will be featured at Old Mosport on Labour Day weekend, with the Chevrolet Silverado 250 scheduled for Sun., Sept. 1.
– Carl Edwards won the pole at Charlotte for Saturday night’s All-Star Race. NASCAR relaxed all the rules for this session and qualifying consisted of three flying laps and a no-speed-limit-on-pit-lane stop for four tires. Total times for the laps and pit stop were added up to set the field.
Not wanting to appear terribly negative about this (ED NOTE: Ho, ho ho), the reason there is a speed limit in pit lanes in every major form of motorsport in the world is because drivers can sometimes lose control of race cars at speed and unprotected people – i.e. pit crew members changing tires on cars – can be hit and be hurt, as a result.
So although some marketing genius thought it would be a scream to put away the radar guns and let the boys "have at it" along pit road at 155 mph, it is just as easy to have a bad accident at an exhbition race like the All-Star as it is at a "regular" race and it is sincerely hoped that they don’t do anything stupid like this again because Edwards called his run "petrifying."
Dale Earnhardt Jr. was second-fastest but the tire stop was botched and he was penalized five seconds, dropping him to 15th. Kurt Busch, who qualified third, will go off second, as a result.
– Mensa membership candidate Kimi Raikkonen says the key to winning the Grand Prix of Monaco is to qualify well.
– Scott Dixon is scheduled to be the first driver to take time when qualifying for the 97th Indianapolis 500 gets under way on Saturday.
Actually, car No. 40 is supposed to go out first, but since no driver is currently in the car it’s expected that Dixon will be the first to take a crack at the pole.
Like many things in 2013, qualifying at Indianapolis is terribly complicated and gimmicky and I’m not going to waste my time trying to explain it. I much preferred the old way of doing it, which was the driver with the fastest time on the first day of qualifying won the pole. Straight up, simple and to the point and I’m like that about everything in life.
James Hinchcliffe of Oakville is scheduled to go off 14th Saturday and Alex Tagliani of Montreal, the other Canadian who’s a previous pole winner at Indy, is down in 37th position.
Hinchcliffe was fastest of 32 drivers who went out to practice on Tuesday and his teammates, E.J. Viso and Marco Andretti, were first and second fastest on what’s commonly called "Fast Friday."
Said Hinchcliffe: "I think the weird thing about Indy is we have 10 times more practice time than anywhere else, yet you always wish you had a little bit more to make it that little bit better.
"I think it's just a function of a bunch of drivers and a bunch of engineers who are perfectionists and are always striving to make it a little better. But I think we can be pretty pleased with how things have gone.
"Obviously, having team cars up there all but one day bodes well. Qualifying is definitely going to be tough. There's a lot of quick cars. Finding that right level of downforce that takes enough drag off but doesn't leave you sliding all over the place and scrubbing speed is going to be key, and it would have been nice to have a run or two more to really nail that down.
"As a team, I think we're confident and it's going be tough because, like I said, there's a lot of fast cars that are going to be going for that Fast Nine. Hopefully we can get there and get the GoDaddy car in a good position for the start of the race."
(About the importance of starting position versus the quality of the race car):
"It's Sunday that everybody cares about. Dario (Franchitti) proved last year that qualifying is not the be-and all-end – he qualified 17th (and won). He even got hit in pit lane and fell right to the back, but he had a good race car and got his way back up to the front. So it's definitely important to focus on the race car.
"What's so tricky about (IMS) is it's so sensitive to different weather conditions. So if you're working on your race car throughout the entire week and you actually see a variety of different conditions, that's good. Whatever comes around on Race Day, you'll at least have a little bit of an understanding of what the car and track might do."
– At Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, practice and qualifying will take place Saturday for the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series, the Trans Am, Formula 1600, the Porsche GT3 Challenge Cup Canada and the Canadian Touring Car Championship, as well as the Supercars.
There will be a few races but the headline events are scheduled for Sunday.
If you haven’t been out to the new and improved Old Mosport in awhile, why not drop by? You won’t believe the improvements that have been made.
- Everything old is new again.
Honda, which powered McLaren to 44 Grand Prix victories and several world championships between 1988 and 1992, announced
today it would partner again with the legendary British marque, starting
in 2015.
Of course, the previous run of success was due, in large
part, to the driver lineup McLaren boasted in the late 1980s: Ayrton
Senna and Alain Prost. In fact, in 1988, those two between them
won 15
of the 16 GP races that year. Whether Jenson Button (who called the
team's performance so far in 2013 "embarrassing," just the other day)
and Sergio Perez can ever deliver the same results is debatable and you
have to wonder whether a pilot shakeup might be in the cards as well.
Honda
has been in and out of the sport over the years, leaving the last time
after the 2008 season. For automakers, racing has always been about ROI
(return on investment) and whether or not participation makes economic
sense, even at the best of times. Five years ago there was an economic
meltdown and Honda, as well as Toyota, decided to fold cards and wait
for a better day.
In a release issued today, Honda said that
beginning next year, "new F1 regulations require the introduction of a
1.6 litre direct injection turbocharged V6 engine with energy recovery
systems. The opportunity to further develop these powertrain
technologies through the challenge of racing is central to Honda’s
decision to participate in F1.
"Throughout its history, Honda has
passionately pursued improvements in the efficiency of the internal
combustion engine and in more recent years, the development of
pioneering energy management technologies such as hybrid systems.
Participation in Formula 1 under these new regulations will encourage
even further technological progress in both these areas."
The
announcement means there will be no renewal of the contract McLaren has
had with engine supplier Mercedes that goes back to 1995. It has not
exactly been a fruitful partnership, with only one constructor's
championship to the team's credit (and there are certainly no driver's
or constructor's titles looming on the horizon this year).
Said
McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh, at a media conference in Tokyo:
"Honda has an unrivalled pedigree as a manufacturer of turbocharged
engines, making it the perfect engine partner for McLaren as we strive
to deliver future success in F1."
As mentioned, Honda has
participated in F1 several times over the years, starting in 1964 when
it designed and developed both the race car and the engine. That
experiment ended in 1968. Starting in 1983, it supplied engines to
Lotus, Williams and Tyrrell before settling in at McLaren in 1988,
dropping out of the sport again after 1991.
Jacques Villeneuve's
manager Craig Pollock talked Honda into returning to F1 in 2000 to
supply engines to BAR and Jordan and then in 2004 the Japanese
manufacturer bought the team. From then until 2008, it ran the team, as it had in the beginning back in the 1960s, as an "all Honda" operation.
- Twenty-nine drivers flashed around the 2.5-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway Wednesday in a time somewhere between 40 and 41 seconds. That’s how close the competition is this year.
Dario
Franchitti was fastest at 40:1363 seconds while 29th-fastest was Pippa
Mann at 40:9476. Franchitti’s speed, incidentally, translates into
224.236 miles an hour while Mann went 219.793 mph.
Other notables:
Townsend Bell, an Indy-only racer, was second fastest at 40:2295
seconds. Helio Castroneves was third quickest at 40:2327. Alex Tagliani
of Montreal was fastest Canadian and eighth on the totem pole with a lap
of 40:4768. The other Canuck, James Hinchcliffe of Oakville, who was
fastest Tuesday, slipped to 13th at 40:6009. Simona de Silvestro was fastest woman at 40:9353, just pipping Pippa’s 9476.
Michel Jourdain Jr. was the slowest of the 32 who practiced, turning a lap of 41:2774 (218:037 mph).
- Speaking of the Indy 500,
check George’s TV Listings for Race Fans at wheels.ca for times of the
Sportsnet coverage of time trials this Saturday and Sunday as well as
for the race itself a week Sunday. And if you can’t get to a TV, and
have satellite radio, Sirius XM (Channel 211) will be carrying most of
the action as well, starting at 11 a.m. Saturday.
- The Grand Prix of Canada
is fast approaching. As anybody who goes knows, there is more to watch
on track at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve than the F1 cars. This week,
organizers announced that the Ferrari Challenge, Porsche GT3 Cup
Challenge Canada, the Canadian Touring Car Championship and the Formula
Tour 1600 will each run two races on Friday and Saturday, June 7 and 8.
The Grand Prix itself, of course, goes to the post on Sunday, June 9.
- Speaking of the Porsche GT3 Cup,
the Canadian Touring Cars and Formula 1600, they all will be in action
this coming weekend at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park as the annual
Victoria Day Weekend Speedfest takes to the track north of Bowmanville.
The
headline event will be the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series stockers and
D.J. Kennington, J.R. Fitzpatrick, Scott Steckly and the rest of the
trans-Canada chargers — oops, better not forget Andrew Ranger — will be
out to start their national series season off with a bang.
Touring
car drivers looking to get rolling early include Benjamin Distaulo, Bob
Attrell, Remy Audette, Nick Wittmer, Roger Ledoux, Damon Sharpe, Frank
Blanchet and Michel Sallenbach.
Also on the card at Old Mosport will be the Trans-Am big iron thunder cars and the new Canadian Supercar Series.
- Speaking of touring cars
(not really, but I’m looking for a segway), the German Touring Car
Series (DTM) will be at Brands Hatch in England this weekend and
Canadian Robert Wickens is hoping for a better result than two weeks ago
at the opener in Germany when a mechanical problem forced him out after
he qualified better than he has in his DTM career — fourth on the grid.
Said
Wickens, in a release: “After not finishing at the start of the season,
I'm itching to get back in my STIHL Mercedes AMG C-Coupé at Brands
Hatch (Norris note: I bet he said that . . .) to prove that a top-notch
result would have been possible in Hockenheim. With P4 on the grid, I've
shown the kind of speed I can produce. The adrenaline rush of being in
the shoot-out for pole position in Q4 for the first time was enormous - I
could easily get used to that in the future. While a sketch map of
Brands Hatch may look quite simple, it's a real driver's circuit that
demands the utmost concentration over 98 laps. One single error and the
race is as good as lost."
Good luck, Robert.
- Everybody seems to be excited that Derrick Walker has been signed by IndyCar to be president, operations and competition.
So?
The
competition is already pretty good. So what is this going to do so far
as bums in the seats and eyeballs on race telecasts are concerned,
which to my mind are IndyCar’s two biggest challenges.
Once again,
we have a top dog at that organization listening to two or three Indy
car journalists who think moves like this are swell.
Marketing is where this organization needs help. And in public relations.
Not media relations, public relations.
- Finally, the Brantford-area Ohsweken Speedway's
18th annual Opening Night will take the green flag on Friday at 7:30pm,
and large fields are expected in all of the regular Friday night
divisions.
The opening event of Ohsweken's season will include the
Corr/Pak Merchandising Sprint Cars, Affordable Towing & Recovery
Thunder Stocks, HRW Automotive Mini Stocks, and Gale’s Auto Aftermarket
Bombers, with extra-distance features on tap for each.
It might not mean a whole lot at this stage of the game, but the fact that Oakville’s James Hinchcliffe set the fastest time during practice Tuesday for next weekend’s Indianapolis 500 time trials means Indy car racing’s hottest driver is settling nicely into a groove for a run at pole position.
Hinchcliffe, the 26-year-old super nova who’s won two of the four IZOD IndyCar Series races to date, put the hammer down at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and turned a speed of 224.210 miles an hour (40:1410 seconds around the 2.5-mile oval race track), albeit while driving teammate Marco Andretti’s car to exchange notes.
Andretti, meantime, drove Hinchcliffe’s GoDaddy-sponsored Green Machine to the third-fastest time of the day, going 223.570 mph. The Andretti Autosport teammates were split by second-fastest driver J.R. Hildebrand, who went 223.652 mph.
In all, 34 driver-car combinations turned time while preparing for Saturday’s time trials that will determine who will start first and so on back to 33 and last when the 97th 500-mile race goes to the post on Sunday, May 26th.
Said Hinchcliffe: "Marco (Andretti) is pretty angry with me now. Not only did I rock a big tow, which he is famous for, but I did it in his car, so "Marco Tow-dretti" is pretty upset with me now.
"It's good to be up there, but at the end of the day, those numbers don't mean a lot right now. It's about the work you do on the race car and making sure the No. 27 GoDaddy car is going to be good not only on one lap, but over 200 (laps)."
Asked why he’d traded cars with Andretti and if he learned anything, Hinchcliffe added: "I get to see how good I look in red and blue (the colours of Marco’s car). There are some things we wanted to see and suss out, and that's the way to do it.
"It's (trading cars) not uncommon. Guys have done it in the past – especially this team. I think TK (Tony Kanaan) drove every single car on the team at some point during the month (when he was an Andretti driver). It's standard procedure to feel a couple of things out."
Practice will continue through Friday and then qualifying time trials will be held Saturday, with bump day (in which faster cars "bump" slower cars out of the field) scheduled for Sunday.
I said in the beginning that fast times don’t mean a lot and that’s because both engine suppliers, Chevrolet and Honda, will be fitting qualifying motors into all (or most) cars toward the end of the week and a horsepower boost will be allowed for time trials.
Horsepower will be dialed back, however, for the race itself.
Social note: Dario Franchitti, who’s won the Indy 500 three times and is the defending champion, will turn 40 on Sunday.
For those of you who emailed wondering where I was, my real newspaper job sometimes gets in the way of my fun newspaper job and the fun newspaper job (this) has to take a back seat.
So, after a week’s absence, here are some random thoughts about the state of the sport following a weekend of ho-hum racing (at least the offerings on television).
1. The people who run Formula One have outsmarted themselves once again. To make the sport more exciting – they didn’t really have to do this; it was exciting enough – they ordered the one tire supplier, Pirelli, to build degradation into the product so the drivers would have to make more pit stops.
Now, everybody is either up in arms (if you’re a fan) or "concerned" (if you’re one of the people in F1 who thought this stuff up) because the tires are coming apart faster than anybody expected.
Most teams had to make four (count ‘em, four) pit stops during Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix (click here for story and results) and critics (including 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve) were making fun of the spectacle rather than marvelling at the skill of the pit crews in getting the tires changed so quickly.
Said Villeneuve: "At this rate, F1 is going to become a pit-stop contest with a few race laps thrown in."
Every time anybody in any sport starts monkeying around with the thing to make it more "appealing" or more "exciting," they are just inviting trouble. Has baseball gone to four strikes to enable more hitters to reach base? Or moved the mound back a foot? Has hockey gone to four quarters instead of three periods? Of course not.
But F1 now has tires that disintegrate and drag reduction systems and kinetic energy recovery systems and, as a result, except for the opening laps there is very little racing going on any more.
Memo to F1: Stop this.
2. See second last paragraph above. The first lap of Sunday’s Spanish GP was edge-of-your-seat stuff with everybody reacting so quickly to lights out that analyst David Coulthard suggested at least one driver had jumped the start.
And although Mercedes pole-sitter Nico Rosberg held the lead to the conclusion of that first lap, everybody else was either charging to the front or sliding back.
Eventual race winner Fernando Alonso went from fifth to third in his Ferrari and passed two cars on the outside of one corner. Lewis Hamilton, who started second for Mercedes, dropped to fourth. Kimi Raikkonen, who went off third for Lotus-Renault, dropped to fifth. Three-time world champion Sebastian Vettel moved from third to second in his Red Bull-Renault and Felipe Massa went from ninth to sixth in his Ferrari. But the best of all was Adrien Sutil rocketing from 13th place to eighth in his Force India-Ferrari and that, ladies and gentlemen, was an incredible example of car control and balls.
Oh, before I forget, Mark Webber had his usual crappy start and dropped out of the top ten from his seventh starting position and – I ask you – why should we be surprised? I suggest they put Webber in the simulator for a week and not let him out until he can make flying starts in his sleep.
3. In winning the Grand Prix, Alonso joined Vettel as two-time winners this season. Raikkonen is the only other winner, scoring his victory at Australia. Rosberg has now won two poles on the year but both times, in Bahrain and again at Spain, he faded out of the top five. He finished fifth in Spain and ninth at Bahrain.
And Esteban Gutierrez was the best of this year’s rookie crop, finishing in 11th position for Sauber-Ferrari and beating his more experienced teammate, Nico Hulkenburg, who was 15th. More impressive was the fact that Gutierrez qualified 16th but was penalized three places for blocking Raikkonen during qualifying. Racing from 19th starting position to 11th earns him the McDonald "Hard Charger Award."
Elsewhere this weekend, Carlos Muniz – an Indy Lights driver – was fastest of the IZOD IndyCar Series drivers who went out to practice at Indianapolis Motor Speedway as the track opened for practice and qualifying leading up to the 97th Indy 500 in two weeks.
Muniz recorded a speed of 223.023 miles an hour Sunday (it took him 40.3545 seconds to drive a lap of the 2.5-mile speedway; click here for details). James Hinchcliffe of Oakville was sixth fastest of the 23 drivers who turned time, recording a lap of 220.907 mph. Qualifying and bumping (if any) is scheduled for next weekend.
Speaking of Hinchcliffe, I was pleasantly surprised last Monday afternoon when, while driving home, I heard everybody’s favourite afternoon drive sports talk radio show host Bob McCown wax eloquently about James’ victory the previous afternoon in Brazil (which he won on the last corner of the last lap).
I haven’t heard McCown talk about car racing before, although I’m sure he has at one time or another. He simply said he’d tuned in the race to check it out with 15 or so laps to go and Hinchcliffe was running fifth and that he "had a feeling" and stayed till the end.
He went so far as to call the finish one of the most exciting moments in recent live sports television history (or words to that effect).
He brought it up with a couple of his guests – neither had been watching, by the way – and opined that he would be keeping an eye on young Mr. Hinchcliffe, whom he later interviewed (although I didn’t hear that).
Now, I realize that Bob McCown works for Sportsnet, and that Sportsnet is televising this year’s IZOD IndyCar Series races as well as the Indianapolis 500 and some "cross-promotion" is to be expected.
But I honestly think McCown was impressed with the finish (who wouldn’t have been!) and saw the potential that Indy car racing and Hinchcliffe both have. Good stuff.
One last thing: he said he didn’t like cars racing on ovals because ovals are for horses. Then he hesitated, and mused: "I wonder how horses would do on a road course?"
1. That Matt Kenseth won was the perfect revenge for Joe Gibbs Racing, which had been put through the wringer in recent weeks by NASCAR over nothing. I hope Kenseth wins every race between now and the end of the year and that Joe Gibbs rubs NASCAR’s nose in it when he stands up to accept accolades at the season-ending banquet.
Joe Gibbs is a religious, God-fearing man. NASCAR, which cast the first stone, should brace itself for what’s coming.
2. NASCAR loves to go around penalizing and fining drivers and teams enormous amounts of money in order to show them who’s boss. I think it’s time Kyle Busch was fined something like – oh, off the top, I‘d say – $200,000 for having a snit yet again because he didn’t win a race.
All the others losers of the Southern 500 – all 41 others – made themselves available to TV and other reporters after the race because that’s what they’re supposed to do as representatives of the sport of stock car automobile racing.
They are on the top of the mountain and they owe it to their fans and sponsors to address the media after the races, win or lose. Kenseth won the race but Jimmie Johnson went on TV, as did Jeff Gordon and Kevin Harvick and a couple of the others.
But not Kyle, because he was off somewhere having a hissy fit. He was only too happy to talk on Friday night, after he won the Nationwide Series race, but not Saturday because he lost.
I can remember several years ago everybody making great fun of Danica Patrick stamping her feet in anger after being edged out of a win in the Indy car series. But after she did what competitive people do - which is to work out their frustrations and then take a deep breath and calm down - she went to the post-race press conference and answered questions like a true professional.
But not Kyle and I think it’s time NASCAR brought him to heel. Every professional sport demands its performers be accountable to the media. Win or lose, the hockey players and coaches have to talk to reporters. Baseball managers and players are contractually obligated, and so on.
The next time Kyle Busch doesn’t win and then pulls one of his disappearing acts, he should be hit in the pocketbook.
And told to grow up.
Other racing: Lucas Luhr and Klaus Graf won the American Le Mans Series race at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on Saturday. Jan Magnussen and Antonio Garcia were first in GT, with Marino Franchitti and Scott Tucker first in P2. Mike Guasch and Luis Diaz won the Prototype Challenge race while Nick Tandy and Henrique Cisneros were first in GT Challenge.
Ryan Briscoe finished fourth overall and second in P2 before heading off the Indianapolis where he is among the favourites to win this year’s Indy 500. Townsend Bell also raced in ALMS before flying to Indy.
Kyle Marcelli of Barrie was eighth overall and fourth in PC. Kuno Wittmer of Montreal didn’t do all that well this weekend and was well back.
Okay, I have to say it: sometimes sports car racing doesn’t make any sense. We all know that all the classes – five of them this season – all go out and race together. And that the first three finishers in every class make it onto the podium, which means 15 or more drivers can sometimes be on the podium in a sports car race.
Saturday evening, I got an email that trumpeted "Delta Wing car on podium in ALMS race in California." Hey, I thought. That’s damn fine. And Katherine Legge, who’s been run out of Indy car, must be feeling pretty good about making it onto the podium in her first ALMS race.
Then I looked at the results. There were 36 cars in total in that race Saturday and the Delta Wing finished 32nd. I don't care about rules or tradition. That is not a podium.
The Southern Ontario Sprints will start their 18th season next Saturday night at Brighton Speedway. Lee Ladouceur of Alexandria will try for his third consecutive championship this season. Other top runners expected to be on hand include Glenn Styers, Keith Dempster, Chris Jones, Adam West and Warren Mahoney. I betcha Warren's Dad, Dick Mahoney, will be out there too.
Indy car driver and partner in the Schmidt-Petersen Indy car team, Davey Hamilton, won the supermodified feature at Oswego Speedway on Saturday night. At Merrittville Speedway outside Thorold, Erick Rudolph and Kevin Knapp scored their first 2013 wins in the Bobcat of Hamilton 358 Modified and Hoosier Stock Divisions respectively. In Lucas Oil Weekly Racing Series action, Kyle Pelrine, Josh Sliter and Brad Rouse won in the Turn 4 Collision 4 Cylinder, J&S Heating and Air Conditioning Modified Lites and the Rick’s Delivery Sportsman Features.
Most southern Ontario oval facilities will be in action next weekend and the Victoria Day Speedfest is on tap at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park but that’s not all. Attention all you drag racing fans out there. Toronto Motorsports Park near Cayuga has got a monster lineup scheduled with 300 mph jet dragsters, the Pro Modified Racing Association, the Quick 32 top dragsters and sportsman plus pro bikes and sleds. They get going out there on Friday night and plan to blast all the way through till Sunday. Go to torontomotorsportpark.com for more info.
Speaking of "most southern Ontario oval facilities," if you head on out to Peterborough Speedway, it won’t cost you anything to sit in the grandstand. Country 105 radio station is picking up the tab for the season-opener. For info, go to peterboroughspeedway.com.
Takuma Sato won the first IndyCar race of his career Sunday in Long Beach as James Hinchcliffe's early season struggles continued. For the second race in a row, the Oakville native didn't finish - this time as the result of a crash.
Meanwhile, Matt Kenseth won the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Kansas Speedway. He held off a fast-charging Kasey Kahne to win by 0.151 seconds. Jimmie Johnson was third, Martin Truex Jr. finished fourth and Clint Bowyer was fifth.
It was a typical NASCAR race, with spins and crashes and all sorts of high-speed excitement. One interesting note: the pole winner won the race for the third straight time. The last time this happened was in 1985. For full story and results, click here.
Sebastien Vettel easily won the Grand Prix of Bahrain over Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean. It was an all-Renault powered podium. Lots of good racing back in the pack. For my take, please click here.
AT LONG BEACH
Sato's victory (see picture) was the first for the Japanese racer, who had a crack at Formula One, since the Macau Grand Prix in 2001. For his team, A.J. Foyt Racing, it was the first win since 2002 (Airton Dare at Kansas Speedway) and the first road course triumph since Silverstone in 1978 when God's own A.J. himself was driving.
(An aside: There are those who believe that if Eddie Cheever, who was driving for Foyt in 1995, had won that year's CART race at Nazareth, there never would have been an Indy Racing League. The reason? Foyt was a serious influence on the thinking of Tony George. Foyt had raced in CART going back to 1979 and couldn't win, so pushed George to form the breakway series. But, the thinking goes, if his team actually won a CART race, he'd have been more inclined to hang in. As luck would have it, Cheever ran out of fuel a lap short at Nazareth and the IRL started racing the next January.)
Sato had no trouble holding off second-place Graham Rahal, with Justin Wilson third and pole-sitter Dario Franchitti fourth. JR Hildebrand was promoted to fifth after Oriol Servia, who finished there, was assessed a penalty that moved him back a spot. For full story and results, click here.
Sato was delighted to win, and as Canada's Hinchcliffe had done at St. Pete with the Maple Leaf flag, the Japanese driver unfolded a Japanese flag and waved it in celebration. By winning, he became the first Japanese driver to record a victory in Indy cars.
Like Toronto, Long Beach is really too tight for the high speed Indy cars and many of the drivers were forced into the pits to have nose cones replaced on their cars after they broke them running into other cars.
And Servia wasn't the only driver penalized. Rookie Tristan Vautier was penalized twice, once for running into the back of Scott Dixon and again after he hit Will Power's car.
NOTEBOOK JOTTINGS
- You could look at the accident that eliminated Hinchcliffe three ways.
1. It was his fault for not slowing down and letting everybody else go through Turn One before him on a restart on Lap 36.
2. It was Tony Kanaan's fault for cutting down to the corner from the outside lane and chopping across the front of Hinchcliffe's car, making a collision unavoidable for the Oakville driver.
3. It was IndyCar's fault for giving the restart a green flag. Kanaan clearly was passing cars before the green was waved and the yellow should have been shown. As it was, Kanaan had a full head of steam that took him up into the lead pack and to make the corner he had to turn in sharply and that resulted in E.J. Viso and Hinchcliffe crashing, with Hinch getting the worst of it.
You know, everybody talks about how wonderful the officiating has been in that series ever since Brian Barnhart was relieved of his duties.
Oh?
You want me to start?
How about the penalty on Scott Dixon last year after which it was discovered the officials were watching the wrong video replay?
I could go on, starting with the green-that-should-have-been-a-yellow yesterday and one other glaring example of incompetence in the same race.
The Indy cars - never mind the sanctioning body. be it CART, IRL or Champ Car - haven't had a decent starter/flagger since Nick Fornoro retired. Nick was a midget racer who could feel the rhythm of a race and flag it accordingly. With an ace flagger like Roger Slack available (okay, his day job is running Eldora Speedway but somebody should ask if he's interested), I can't understand why the top open-wheel racing series on the continent continues to employ officials whose qualifications are questionable.
And then there was, as I called it two paragraphs back, that other glaring example of incompetence Sunday. With two laps remaining, Tony Kanaan misses his braking point and crashes into the tires at Turn One (the end of Shoreline Dr.). The decision is made that the race will continue and there will only be a local yellow waved.
So the leader of the race, Sato, who's starting the last lap, has to pick his way through there, as does the second place car, Rahal, and Wilson, and the rest. The race continues at speed and then, when Sato has two corners to go before the checkers - two corners - they decide to make it a full-course caution.
Huh? They decide on a full-course caution after the entire field drives through the crash scene and the race is two corners from beiing over? Is that a joke, or what?
Bring back Brian Barhart.
- Okay, how come the Grand Prix of Long Beach, which started in 1975 as a Formula 5000 race, became a Formula One race seven or eight years and has featured Indy cars ever since, continues to draw an enormous crowd (there wasn't a seat empty in any of the many grandstands) and yet the Indy car race in Toronto, which started in 1986, officially draws flies now in comparison.
Does it have something to do with the title sponsor? The Toyota dealers of southern Californa have been behind this event forever and continue to promote the living daylights out of it.
Just wondering.
- The TV coverage of the race was abysmal.
First, I do not need some person getting a ride in the two seater and screaming over the air that the experience is just like getting a rocket ride to the moon. I could care less.
Next, like a great flagger (see above), a TV director has to feel the rhythm of a race and to be aware of what's happening. Sato peels out of the formation of front-runners, which starts a charge of cars toward the pits, and TV doesn't realize it's happening till he's stopped. Then they show Ryan Hunter-Reay's car being serviced, clearly unaware that Hinchcliffe, who pitted moments later than RHR, has beaten him out.
The kicker is when the camera is on Alex Tagliani and Charlie Kimball, side-by-side and rubbing tires and clearly heading for trouble, and suddenly the camera is switched to a stationary Franchitti getting fuel. Whoopie! Then we are returned to Alex and Charlie, who by this time have crashed, which we missed seeing because the guy/girl making decisions on what we see doesn't know what he/she is doing.
I hate yelling at my television.
- Remeber Kimi Raikkonen crashing at Monaco a few years back and being so angry that he refused to take his helmet off as he walked all the way back to his yacht in the harbour?
That was Hinchcliffe yesterday. The Oakville driver was so pissed off that he walked back to the pits and got on his motor scooter and blasted off toward his motorhome and his helmet remained on his head and he even, like Kimi, kept the visor closed.
Usually a happy guy and ready to be everybody's friend, Hinch was obviously in no mood for company.
The next race is in Brazil in two weeks. Let's hope he has better luck there.
Other weekend races of note:
- The new Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Tex., played host Sunday to an early season Moto GP motorcycle race and a 20-year-old Spaniard, Marc Marquez, became the youngest winner in Moto GP history. Dani Pedrosa finished second with Jorge Lorenzo third. The motorycle circus will be back in North America in August for races at Laguna Seca in California and at Indianapolis. Next year, I suggest Montreal's Circuit Gilles Villeneuve will also be on the Moto GP schedule, either following Indianapolis or replacing it on the calendar.
- Klaus Graf and Lucas Luhr won the American Le Mans Series race at Long Beach. Jonathan Bennett and Colin Braun won in Prototype Challenge, Scott Sharp and Guy Cosmos were first in the P2 class, Bill Auberlen and Maxime Martin won the GT class and Henrique Cisneros and Sean Edwards were tops in GT Challenge.
Canadians: Kuno Wittmer of Hudson, Que., was 15th overall and eighth in GT and Kyle Marcelli of Barrie was 25th and sixth in Prototype Challenge.
Speaking of P2, and Canadians, Wheels special correspondent Sylvia Proudfoot reports
that Leigh Pettipas of Halifax was the engineer for the winning car of
Sharp and Cosmo. Pettipas also engineered the Extreme Speed Motorsports
Ferrari F458 Italia that won the GT class at the 2012 Petit Le Mans at
Road Atlanta..
For race details and complete results, click here.
- At Road Atlanta, Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas won their one-millionth (I'm kidding!) Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series race, driving a BMW-Riley Daytona Prototype. John Edwards and Robin Lidell won the GT class in a Chevrolet Camaro. Joe Miller and Andrew Carbonell were first in the new GX class, driving a Mazda 6 Skyactiv Diesel. For details, click here.
Canadians in the Rolex race: Michael Valiante of Vancouver was seventh overall and seventh in a Ford-Riley DP; AIM Autosport of Woodbridge with assistance from Remo Ferri and Brian Wingett finished 17th overall and sixth in class with Max Papis and Jeff Segal aboard; the AIM Autosport Team FXDD with Ferrari car was 19th and eighth, Emil Assentato and Anthony Lazzaro driving.
Canadians in the Supporting Continental Tire race: Scott Maxwell of Toronto, driving and Aston Martin Vantage for Markham's Multimatic Motorsports, finished fourth overall and fourth in class in Grand Sport; Multimatic's sister Aston Martin racers were fifth (and fifth) with Tonis Kasemets and Michael Marsal driving and 11th and 11th with David Empringham and JohnFarano, both of Toronto, behind the wheel; Kenny Wilden of Oakville was ninth overall and ninth in the GS class; Ashley McCalmont of Ancaster finished 14th and 14th in GS; Taylor Hacquard of Vancouver was 30th overall and 14th in the Street Tuner class; Paul Dalla Lana of Toronto was 52nd overall and 22nd in GS.
- Canadians in the Indy Lights race at Long Beach: Matthew Di Leo of Innisfil was fifth. Quebe driver Mikael Grenier crashed.
Canada's Paul Tracy was inducted into the Long Beach Motorsports Walk of Fame Thursday morning and the honour affected him more than perhaps even he'd anticipated.
He won the Long Beach Indy Lights race in 1990 driving for Brian Stewart, made his first Indy car start in Long Beach in 1991 for Dale Coyne and earned his first Indy car victory on the temporary street circuit in 1993 for Team Penske.
He also won the Long Beach Indy car races in 2000, 2003 and 2004.
Toronto Star Wheels' special correspondent Sylvia Proudfoot is in Long Beach and filed notes and quotes after the ceremony.
"You can’t have a great race without having a great city to host it," an emotional Tracy said during the ceremony.
"I want to thank Long Beach for everything that they do putting on this race. It's one of the marquee races in the world in terms of motorsports. If you've won a race here, you put your name on a list of some of the greatest drivers that have ever walked the face of the earth, guys like Parnelli [Jones, who attended the ceremony], Bryan Redman, Danny Sullivan, Michael Andretti – the list goes on and on.
"I drove in last night and I got to the hotel like I would every year for almost 25 years of my life. I went for a walk and the sun was setting to the west and I was walking across the bridge over to the marina. I took a look down the front straightaway and I said to myself, 'Man, where did all the time go?' I was looking at the sun setting and I was thinking the sun has set on my career now. But I feel as young as ever!
"I've got to thank all the teams I drove for and all the great competitors that spurred me on. Winning here at Long Beach has been one of the highlights of my career, so I'm very very honoured to be in this group and I really cherish it."Tracy, whose four Long Beach victories tie him for second with Mario Andretti (Al Unser Jr. has won the most: six), was joined by Adrian Fernandez in being inducted into the Walk of Fame during the eighth annual ceremony.
Previous inductees include Jimmy Vasser, Scott Pruett, Galles Racing, Chip Ganassi Racing Teams, Sullivan, Michael Andretti, Bobby Rahal, Mario Andretti, Unser Jr. Phil Hill, Dan Gurney, Brian Redman, Newman Haas Racing, Chris Pook, Parnelli Jones and Gary Gabelich.
After the ceremony, Tracy told Proudfoot that, "I'm thrilled to be selected to be part of this list of great drivers. They're legends. I never thought in my wildest dreams when I started racing, when I started my Indy car career here in 1991, that I would ever be mentioned with those guys' names, so it's a tremendous honour.
"Toronto, as my hometown (where he's won two races), was always my favourite race, but this race here was one that I've always excelled at. I've had a lot of success here, been incredibly lucky here. To win races, you've got to be good and you've got to be lucky. For whatever reason, I was always pretty lucky here and things kinda went the way that I wanted them to go.
"I won here in Indy Lights and four times in an Indy car, so Long Beach has been a great city to me."
Tracy's CART victory at Long Beach in 2003 was one of seven he scored during the season on his way to the series championship. He is tied with Sebastien Bourdais and Dario Franchitti for seventh on the all-time victory list with 31.
Proudfoot also caught up with Oakville IndyCar star James Hinchcliffe, in town for Sunday's Grand Prix of Long Beach, and reviewed his season to date: a victory in St. Petersburg and no points at the second race at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama.
"It just highlights the sport," he said. "It really is the highest of highs and the lowest of lows and in the first two races we experienced pretty much all of that.
"It's hopefully going to be pretty straightforward from here on out. This (Long Beach) is a track that's historically treated me pretty well. We've had some good results here and the team's been strong here in the past. It's certainly promising coming into it, but these races are so unpredictable. You never know."
The other day, somebody asked Stirling Moss — Sir Stirling, to you — whether a woman could ever win a Formula One race and he said he didn’t think so.
There was outrage around the world.
How dare that man say such a thing!
Give me a break.
Can’t somebody say something these days, or do something, without there being outrage because whatever was said or done didn’t fit people’s preconceived notion of the answer or the deed?
Do people in the world walk around in a perpetual state of almost-outrage, just waiting for someone to say or do something so they can react? Get the juices flowing, as it were?
Moss stated an opinion. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong but doesn’t he have the right to answer a question without half the world jumping all over him?
Poor Justin Bieber, who’s a kid from Stratford, writes something in a book and the world is outraged. Or so the media say.
Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper get up in the morning and they both say something and half of Canada is outraged about what one said and the other half is similarly outraged about what the other said.
I think the word outrage is now the world’s most overused word.
I’m outraged that so many people are outraged.
I don’t want to live in a world where nobody can have an opinion, which is what is happening here.
Relax.
Mathew Di Leo of IInnisfil will join another Canadian, Mikael Grenier of Stoneham, Que., in the Indy Lights race at Long Beach this weekend. In fact, the two Canadians will make up 20 per cent of the field as only 10 cars are entered.
This is an appalling state of affairs. Indy Lights is supposed to be the final proving/training ground on the Road to Indy ladder system that IndyCar likes to crow about and there are no cars.
The Atlantic Series was in a mess like this back in 2005 when it was on the undercard at Champ Car races. About a dozen cars would show up for each race and only four drivers entered every race (26 in total scored points).
Kevin Kalkhoven, one of the owners of the Champ Car World Series, was appalled at what he saw and over the winter took control of the series. He put the arm on all of the owners in Champ Car as well as around the shoulders of many of his well-heeled friends and insisted they all get involved.
The entry list for Atlantics in 2006 went up to an astonishing 29 cars and 44 drivers in total scored points.
This is what IndyCar has got to do. Right now, in the Lights championship, IRL owner Sam Schmidt has three entries and Andretti Autosport has two. Where are entries from Chip Ganassi Racing, Team Penske, KV Racing (Kevin Kalkhoven did it once; he should do it again), Rahal-Letterman and on-and-on?
All the teams in the NHL have top minor-league affiliates, as do the teams in Major League Baseball. So should the teams in big-league, open-wheel auto racing.
The people who run IndyCar, Mark Miles and the rest, have got to put it to those team owners in IndyCar, as Kalkhoven did in Champ Car, and tell them to get with the program.
Otherwise, quit pretending the series is something it isn’t and shut it down.
Will the Grand Prix of Bahrain this weekend be the tire strategy race we’ve come to expect from Formula One this season?
And, in qualifying, will anybody go out in Q3? Or stand pat where they are after Q2 and save their tires? Or perhaps slap on a set of softs (or intermediates, or whatever) and run a lap or two to make it legal and then sit out the session in the garage.
Smart strategy but F1, as usual, is forgetting the fans, who are being cheated.
Why can’t F1 roll back the clock to the last century and let the teams have qualifying tires? That way, nobody has to worry about saving tires and they can strategize all they want in the race but qualifying would be what it’s supposed to be: a balls-to-the-wall, one-lap, banzai run for pole position and all the marbles that go with it.
All eyes will be on two drivers in the NASCAR races this weekend at Kansas Speedway. (An aside: the last time I was at Kansas Speedway, the tornado sirens kept going off. It was 4 o'clock in the afternoon and it was pitch black. That is a scary deal, let me tell you.)
Kyle Busch will be in his Camping World Truck Series truck as well as his Sprint Cup car. He has a habit of winning both races whenever he enters two of them on the same weekend.
Also, he’s on a tear. After finishing 23rd at Phoenix early in the season, he’s been fourth, second, first, fifth and first since — up to and including last weekend’s stop at Texas.
Busch didn’t make the Chase last season. It looks like he’s not taking any chances this year.
And, of course, the other driver people will be watching is defending Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski.
Yes, Joey Logano and his Penske Racing team were also nailed by NASCAR this week for illegal activity surrounding the suspension on their race car but the heat will be on the Keselowski side of the Penske garage because of his outburst following the Texas race when he suggested NASCAR was out to “get” them.
Both Penske teams have appealed the suspensions, fines, etc., that were levied but NASCAR is the law and the law will eventually win.
I hope Keselowski hasn’t done himself too much damage. His holier-than-thou statements last weekend were a little much and NASCAR fans can be fickle.
In short: a hero can become a villain just like that.
This entry might not be as comprehensive as usual for a Monday Morning Racing Roundup but I spent much of Sunday researching and writing the entry directly below, which is about the death at 87 of Canadian broadcasting pioneer Johnny Esaw, and so I didn’t get to watch a lot of racing.
However, I’m not sure I missed all that much. The NASCAR and IndyCar Series races were both won from the pole – Jimmy Johnson in Sprint Cup and Ryan Hunter-Reay in open wheel. Yes, I’m sure there was a lot of action between the start and the finish of both those races but the fact that the two guys in front at the beginning were still there at the end indicates, to me, anyway, that there was really never any doubt about who was going to win.
And the fact that Canada’s great new hope in IndyCar, James Hinchcliffe of Oakville, spent the entire race strapped in his car while marooned on the far side of the Barber Motorsports Park circuit also meant I wasn’t all that disappointed to have to miss most of the race.
I’ll return to the racing in a moment. First, though, I have to say some more about Esaw.
Although he was primarily involved, and interested, in the traditional stick and ball sports, Esaw was a great friend of racing generally, and Canadian racing in particular.
What’s intriguing is that he wasn’t all that interested in the sport. But, as he told me when I interviewed him at length just about a year ago now for a feature in Toronto Star Wheels, he recognized that there was an audience for motor racing and that he and his station and network would benefit if he treated it with the respect it deserved.
It’s a pity that more of Canada’s broadcasters and newspaper editors haven’t felt the same way.
As I reported in the story below, Esaw and CFTO/CTV produced the first racing broadcast from what was Mosport International Raceway (or Mosport Park, if you want) in the early 1960s, shortly after the station and network went on the air.
For years, Esaw made the Canadian Formula Atlantic championship a part of CTV’s Wide World of Sports program on Saturdays. Much of the program came from ABC’s Wide World of Sports but Esaw had the races inserted into the lineup, with the late Craig Hill as host and analyst.
And, of course, as is also detailed below, starting in 1977 he had the Indianapolis 500 live on CTV for nine years before the ABC coverage went live in the United States. It was a broadcasting coupe.
Esaw told me he didn’t know much about racing but that he had to bone up in a hurry in order to negotiate deals for races. He said Tony Hulman, the late owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, was one of the nicest people he’d ever met and that Bernie Ecclestone was the toughest negotiator he’d encountered in any sport. He also said Stirling Moss was absolutely fascinating.
With his passing, another of the giants is gone. There really aren’t many, if any, left.
NASCAR
The highlight of the weekend, for me and my wife, was Megan McCormick’s song about Joey Logano that she performed with Kyle Petty on NASCAR Raceday Sunday morning on the Speed Channel (click here).
By the end, we were singing along:
Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey
I love you . . .
And our favourite line was:
Joey, pick me up
In your dad’s big truck. . .
The song was part of the all-week, never-ending, WWE-type buildup to Sunday’s race in Martsinville in which the villainous Joey Logano was, apparently, going to "get his" for deliberately wrecking, and hurting, Denny Hamlin in the race two weeks ago in California.
All we heard for most of the two weeks in between races was how there would be "payback."
Well, Logano was involved in a wreck at Martinsville, but so were a whole bunch of other drivers, which is what NASCAR is pretty much all about these days, but it wasn’t deliberate and so I guess we’ll have to wait another day for "payback" to happen, if it ever does.
Hamlin, of course, wasn’t racing Sunday – he’s too badly hurt to get into a car, although he was at the speedway Sunday – so any "payback" by him will have to wait but the word was out that one of his allies, or Tony Stewart, would do the deed and so that’s what all the pre-race excitement was about.
Johnson dominated, of course. He led most of the race and was never lower than fourth. Clint Bowyer finished second and Jeff Gordon was third (the last big "payback" story involved those two – remember the brawl after the race in Phoenix last fall? – but they were both on their best behaviour Sunday). Kasey Kahne was fourth, with Kyle Busch fifth – a heartbeat ahead of Brad Keselowski. Jamie McMurray was seventh, Marcos Ambrose was eighth and Greg Biffle ninth.
Driver of the race was Danica Patrick, who qualified 32nd but lost an engine and had to start 43rd. She was 11th until the final corner when she was bunted aside by Brian Vickers, who also moved Kevin Harvick out of the way.
She wound up 12th but that was a huge achievement, considering she has been struggling since her pole and eighth-place finish at Daytona and because Martinsville is not a place for the faint at heart. It is a physical wringing-out to go 500 laps on the half-mile short track and it’s a tradin’ paint place to boot. She more than held her own and even passed her boss, Tony Stewart, en route to the checkers.
Cool move of the race came when Kurt Busch crashed in Corner One and every liquid under the hood caught fire. Busch had the presence of mind to pull the on-board fire extinguisher to put out the flames before bailing out.
See AP Photo Gallery from Martinsville by clicking here.
INDYCAR
No songs to quote from to start this report but I’m sure James Hinchcliffe, with all his talent and imagination, could write one.
The winner of the first race of the season at St. Petersburg two weeks ago was hit from behind on the opening lap of the race by Oriol Servia, who – in turn – had been hit by Graham Rahal and required a tow back to the pits.
But a wheel came off his car and the IndyCar safety team had to park him in an access road, where he sat for all but the last 18 laps of the 90-lap event.
The team had told him to wait for a yellow and they would get him back to the pits – but there were no further yellows. So "the Mayor (of Hinchtown)" sat there in his car and did what all of us in our living rooms did: watch the race.
Hunter-Reay went pole to checkers. He was chased for the last 20 laps by Scott Dixon, who finished second at Barber for the fourth consecutive year. Helio Castroneves was third with Charlie Kimball fourth and Will Power fifth. Click here for full story and results.
Andretti Autosport, Hinchcliffe’s employer, told him to stay belted in his car for two reasons. First, points are awarded for every position from first to 26th (and last), so even if he was laps down before they could get him back in the race, he could benefit from points earned. Second, with no testing allowed, the team could benefit from having the car run laps in competition in anticipation of the next race, at Long Beach, in two weeks.
Said Hinchcliffe later: "From what I have been told, we all piled into Turn 8; I was behind Tony [Kanaan], [Graham] Rahal hit [Oriol] Servia who got in the back of me. I got in the back of Tony a little bit, but it was pretty square, and it didn’t do any damage to the front. I knew I had gotten hit, but everything was fine at first, but I guess, under caution, things started to work itself loose. As I started to warm the tires up, the wheel actually broke, that was what it was."
A.J. Allmendinger was doing really well in his return to open wheel racing but he stalled during a pit stop and eventually wound up 19th. Penske Racing will still run him at Long Beach in order to give him more seat time before Indianapolis.
Dario Franchitti’s miserable season continued. A broken header led to more serious problems and the four-time champion wound up 25th, one place ahead of Hinchcliffe.
Alex Tagliani of Montreal started 15th and finished 11th. He also was hit from behind and suffered structural damage but soldiered on for a good finish.
Three more things before I take my leave.
1. The last time an Indy car driver won a race and finished last in the next was in 1956 and the unlucky guy was hard-luck racer Lloyd Ruby. Hinch is in good company as Ruby was a helluva shoe.
2. Ryan Briscoe, dropped by Team Penske this year in as strange a move as its embracing of Allmendinger is, will race for Target Chip Ganassi Racing in the Indianapolis 500.
3. I just about fell off my chair when I heard one of the announcers say that a driver – I think it was Justin Wilson – had been seen before the race giving instructions to a volunteer pit-crew member on how to change a tire.
Ryan Hunter-Reay won the pole Saturday for Sunday's Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama IndyCar series race with a blistering lap of 1 minute and 07:0871 seconds around the Barber Motorsports Park road course just outside Birmingham, Alabama.
Scott Dixon threw down the gauntler early in qualifying by smashing the track record by more than three seconds. But by the time the dust had settled, Dixon was fourth fastest behind RHR, Will Power and rookie Tristan Vautier.
It wasn't the best of days for the two Canadians racing in the series. Alex Tagliani of Montreal will go off 15th on Sunday afternoon and St. Petersburg race winner James Hinchcliffe of Oakville will start 20th.
Hinchcliffe was slowest of the four Andretti Autsport drivers, with Hunter-Reay on pole, Marco Andretti seventh and pay driver E.J. Viso 16th.
Said Hinchcliffe later: "We've been struggling a little bit this weekend compared to the test (before the season started when he set second fastest time). We didn't have the quickest car, but had enough for Q2 . . . got held up by another car and ended up getting knocked out.
"It's frustrating, but we've got an extra set of reds (Firestone red alternate tires) than those guys now in the race and maybe degradation will come into it tomorrow. We'll keep fighting and hopefully get the Go Daddy car up in a good position by the end of the day."
The competition in the IndyCar series is ferocious this season. Defending champion Hunter Reay's 1:07:0871 (that's an average of 123:422 miles an hour, by the way) was only a smidgen of a second faster than the 26th - and last - qualifyer, Ed Carpenter, who went around in 1:08:6362.
Other notables: A.J. Allmendinger qualified 10th in his return to IndyCar. Translation: bloody good. Simona de Silvestro, who was fastest in the last practice session before qualifying - one commentator suggested everybody drop the "Swiss Miss" monicker and make it "Swiss Missile" - dropped to 14th when the chips were down. Dario Franchitti continued turning in a less-than-stellar performance this year by qualifying 17th. And five-time Champ Car titleist Sebastien Bourdais will go off 23rd out of 26.
Finally, a bunch of people email me today to say they can't find where the race is on TV Sunday. Wheels has a service especially for folks like these and it's called Wheels Presents George's TV Listings for Race Fans and you can find it by clicking here.
Bookmark it, and you will never have to email me again.
Earlier,
I can’t figure out whether Denny Hamlin is still mad at Joey Logano or just mouthing off in hopes of stimulating interest in Sunday's Sprint Cup race at Martinsville, Va.
Or if he even listens to what’s coming out of his own mouth.
Speed Channel sent out the text of a question-and-answer session it conducted with Hamlin the other day and I read it and I ended up very confused.
For instance:
“I ultimately spun him out at Bristol. I did not intend to spin him out. It was a mistake. I said it was mistake. Said I was sorry on the radio when it happened. That was in retaliation to being chopped off twice and it frustrated me and I intended on bumping him, and then I did and it spun him out.”
See what I mean? He says he didn’t intend to spin Logan out, that it was mistake, he said he was sorry. So far, so good. Then he said it was retaliation. Excuse me? It’s either on purpose or not on purpose and Denny just managed to put both into the same sentence.
I’m sorry Denny Hamilin got hurt when he and Logano collided at Auto Club Speedway in California two weeks ago and they both crashed.
But it wasn’t Logano’s fault that Hamlin was injured; it was the Auto Club Speedway’s fault for not having either a SAFER barrier or foam blocks in place at the spot where Hamlin ran square into a cement wall.
That crash was no different than crashes that happen all the time in NASCAR. If there’d been foam or a SAFER barrier where Hamlin hit, chances are he walks away.
By continuing to talk about it in a way that suggests none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for Logano, Hamlin is setting up the young Penske driver for payback. More than one driver in the last week has talked about Martinsville as being a great place to “get back” at people because the track is small and the speeds aren’t that great.
Which says to me that these guys (and the one woman) have all been lulled into a false sense of security that is going to end in tears one of these days.
Small track, big track – it doesn’t matter. If you’re going more than 100 miles an hour, as they do at Martinsville, you can be killed in a crash. There could be an equipment failure, or the angle of the collision with the wall could be just so, or (as I saw happen once, back in the 1980s) a car going quickly could hammer a stationary car unexpectedly and kill the person in it.
Yes, NASCAR Sprint Cup cars are just like bumper cars, most of the time. That’s why the drivers feel safe in them and talk in a cavalier manner about payback.
Sooner or later, the odds are going to catch up and somebody who starts a race isn’t going to be alive when it ends.
It’s bad enough when it happens to somebody like Dan Wheldon, or Dale Earnhardt – when it’s just “one of them racin’ deals.”
But when people talk in a manner that could be interpreted, by some, as a threat, and there’s a fatality, does NASCAR want to even think about going there?
This is not the WWE, where everything is staged. This is real life and real racing and NASCAR would be wise to step in and shut all this down before things really get out of hand.
In qualifying at Martinsville, Jimmy Johnson will start on the pole for Sunday's race, turning a lap in 19.244 seconds for an average speed of 98.400 miles an hour. All of the 43 drivers who attempted to qualify (Joe Nemechek was last) were less than a second behind the pole sitter. Wow. Marcos Ambrose, Brian Vickers, Joe Logano and Kasy Kahne were the others in the top five. . .
At Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, Helio Castroneves was fastest in IndyCar practice for Sunday's race, with Canadian Alex Tagliani second and Tristan Vautier third. James Hinchcliffe of Oakville, who won the season opener in St. Petersburg, Fla., two weeks ago, was 15th fastest. A.J. Allmendinger, returning to the open cockpit wars after spending time in NASCAR - he's driving for Roger Penske this weekend - was eighth fastest. All 26 cars were within three seconds of each other. . . .
It's a Grand Am sports car weekend at Barber too. The two AIM Autosport of Woodbridge Ferrari entries will go off seventh and eighth in the GT class in the Saturday race. Jon Fogerty won the pole in a Daytona Prototype Corvette.
