Norris McDonald's Auto Racing Blog

On weekend results, concussions and Tony George

When it comes to speed, nobody (and nothing) will be able to beat Felix Baumgartner’s amazing performance Sunday when he became the first human being to break the sound barrier without the aid of an aircraft. For details, click here.

Back here on Earth, however, there were these racing developments:

– Sebestian Vettel has his groove back – he won the Grand Prix of Korea Sunday (click here for details) - and the F1 championship is up for grabs with four races to go. Vettel’s Red Bull-Renault teammate, Mark Webber, was second in Korea with Fernando Alonso third in a Ferrari.

– Clint Bowyer won the NASCAR Sprint Cup Chase for the Championship race at Charlotte Motor Speedway Saturday night (click here for details), mainly by avoiding running out of gas. It was a classic "fuel economy run," with Denny Hamlin finishing second and Jimmie Johnson third.

– Antoine L’Estage of St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., and co-driver Nathalie Richard of Halifax won the Pacific Forest Rally at the weekend. The victory, plus their previous three wins and one second-place finish, saw them clinch their fifth Canadian Rally Championship.

Hardy Schmidtke of Cochrane, Alta., and John Hall of Edmonton were second in the rally, while Max Riddle and Aaron Neumann, both of Vancouver, finished third. Challengers for the championship, Leo Urlichich of Toronto and Carl Williams of Wales, crashed out early.

– Drag racer Eric Latino of Whitby, the subject of a cover page article in Toronto Star Wheels on Labour Day weekend, won the Pro Mod title at the annual Shakedown Nationals in Englishtown, N.J. The Shakedown Nationals is the Indy 500 of Outlaw drag racing for door cars. Well done, Eric.

And then there were these other racing developments:

– Speed TV seems on the way out.

– It’s only a matter of time before Tony George takes over Indy car racing – again.

– The can of worms that’s been opened by Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s concussion.

Speed TV first.

This story came out of the blue last Friday afternoon when a strange item was posted on speedtv.com saying, in so many words, that Speed Channel had lost the TV rights to F1 racing in the United States.

But it didn’t say who, or what, had them for 2013 and beyond and there has been much speculation – since confirmed – that it’s NBC, which would put some of the races on the main network and the rest on its NBC Sports Network channel, formerly Versus, which also has the IZOD IndyCar Series races and, let us not forget, the NHL in the U.S.

Now, there are several aspects of this story worth discussing.

First, Canadian F1 fans don't watch the races on Speed now, so it really doesn’t matter where and with whom Bernie Ecclestone chooses to do business with south of the border. TSN has owned the Canadian rights for years and if TSN doesn’t want to continue then I’m sure Rogers Sportsnet will step in, as it did recently by announcing it would be showing the IndyCar Series races from now on.

In the end, as long as somebody televises F1 races in Canada, I don’t really care who it is.

However, I do enjoy Speed for its Speed News coverage of racing that runs through the weekend, culminating with the 7 p.m. Sunday night show Speed Center. TSN and Sportsnet pretty much pay lip service to auto racing on their sports news shows (as do the all-sports U.S. networks) so Speed Center on Sunday night is a wonderful hour for those of us racing junkies who need a solid fix at the end of the weekend.

Although I don’t want watch it regularly, the Sunday night program Wind Tunnel with Dave Despain is usually a worthwhile hour of racing information and, more important, gossip. And I enjoy – usually, and if I have time – the Sunday morning pre-NASCAR race program, Race Day.

But the rest of it – Pinks All Out, Gearz, Pass Time, Dumbest Stuff on Wheels, and so-on – is boring and a waste of time and a money-losing proposition and is likely why parent company Fox Sports will soon turn the channel into an all-sports network to compete against ESPN and NBC Sports Channel.

– Now, the Tony George and IndyCar story.

It’s interesting how this story has developed. There have been hints, for months, that something was up. But what?

Then, the respected publication Sports Business Journal came out with a story a couple of weeks ago saying George and a group of people including Roger Penske and Chip Ganassi had made an offer to purchase the series from the people who own the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

As this is all about politics (isn’t everything?), certain reporters with vested interests got all sorts of people to deny it. The president of the Speedway said the series wasn’t for sale and even George himself said the story was inaccurate.

However, you will note that Tony George did not say the story was wrong. You will note that the president of the Speedway did not deny that somebody was trying to buy the race series.

Now it turns out that Penske knows all about this but says he isn’t involved. Ganassi says he has an open mind about a takeover but hasn’t done anything about it.

At the end of the day, if George has the money needed to buy the series, he will get it.

Open-wheel racing in the United States was once sanctioned by the AAA. After the Le Mans tragedy in 1955, when more than 80 people were killed when a car went into the crowd, the AAA withdrew from racing and the Indianapolis Speedway owner, Tony Hulman, was instrumental in the formation of the U.S. Auto Club (USAC) to sanction Indy-type car racing.

Although Hulman had influence within the USAC, he wasn’t involved in its operation. And although he promoted the Indy 500 and helped to promote other Indy car races, he did not run Indy car racing.

Neither did the people who took over the running of the Speedway after his death in 1977.

Tony George changed that in the mid-1990s when he started the Indy Racing League after a falling-out with the people who ran CART. In the ensuing war, that lasted until 2008, George – as president and CEO of the Speedway as well as the family business, Hulman and Co. - spent millions of dollars propping up the IRL (just as his counterpart, Kevin Kalhoven, did over at the Champ Car World Series after CART went bankrupt).

But while Kalkhoven was spending his own money, Tony George was spending some that was his and a lot that wasn't. This got him into trouble with his relatives.

George’s sisters and mother forced him out in 2010 and hired Randy Bernard to not only operate the renamed IndyCar Series but to get the budget under control. This he has done but it's still costing the Indianapolis Speedway and Hulman and Co. serious money to own and operate a racing series that is not its core business and it is only a matter of time before the money being offered to buy it is too much to refuse.

It doesn’t matter who’s in or who’s out. Tony George is the key and he wants to own Indy car racing again and who’s going to stop him?

– Finally, the Earnhardt concussion.

I can remember, years ago, looking at photographs of sprint car drivers whose eyes were totally bloodshot after flipping upside down and the captions would talk about how tough those guys were after having their "bells rung."

Awareness of head injuries and ongoing medical research now shows how dangerous this "bell ringing" is.

After knowing he’d been concussed following a testing accident at Kansas Speedway in August, and after being bashed around during the Big One at the conclusion of the NASCAR race at Talladega last weekend, Dale Earnhardt Jr. went to see a doctor and was told to stop driving for at least two races.

Now we have a firestorm of opinion, ranging from people wondering if Earnhardt would have ‘fessed up if he’d been nearer the top of the Chase standings to other race drivers suggesting that they’d felt themselves concussed but didn’t do anything about it.

Race drivers, for all their bravado and machismo, are among the most insecure people on the planet. They will – to a man and woman – walk through fire, if necessary, to keep their rides.

Why? Because they fear that the person who replaces them might do a better job and they will find themselves unemployed.

How many times does a team have a driver on standby, ready to take over if the driver who starts the race has to get out of the car because of illness or injury? And how many times has that second driver actually gotten into a race? Correct. Exactly none.

Denny Hamlin had a knee operation in 2010 and three weeks later won a race at Texas in excruciating pain because he wouldn’t take any pain killers for fear of flunking a drug test. Casey Mears was on standby in case Hamlin needed relief. He was still on standby when Hamlin drove into Victory Lane.

Last night on Speed Center, ex-crew chief Jeff Hammond said Darrell Waltrip had suffered a concussion in a crash in 1982 and "doesn’t remember the next two races." Jeff Gordon, who was on Wind Tunnel, said he’s pretty sure he’d suffered concussions. Lee Roy Yarbrough, a famous 1960s-era stock car star, died in recent years while suffering from a form of dementia brought on by numerous concussions.

The NHL, the NFL and other pro sports leagues have a protocol for dealing with athletes who’ve been knocked silly while on the ice or the field. It will be interesting to see what NASCAR does, now that this particular horse is out of the barn.

Will it continue to treat all the drivers as "independent contractors," and suggest they see their family doctor if they have a headache?

Or will it take responsibility for the athletes and have a head injury test conducted immediately after a driver has been in a crash?

Or, as I suggested the other day, will the insurance companies force the drivers and racing organizations (NASCAR in particular) to take action or else face increased premiums?

This discussion is not going to go away. How NASCAR handles it is going to be just about as important as who wins the Chase for the Championship.

Why did IndyCar official call James Hinchcliffe 'Jim?'

Here are a couple of things to chew on as we head into the holiday season - the inquiry into Dan Wheldon's death and a new class for the Castrol Canadian Touring Car Championship:

1. When I was reading the transcript of the press conference dealing with the inquiry into the death of Dan Wheldon in the final IZOD IndyCar Series race of the 2011 season at Las Vegas in October, this stopped me cold.

Brian Barnhart (he was race director at the time of the accident) was spelling out exactly what happened and he said this: "The accident began as a result of contact between the 06 of Jim Hinchcliffe and the 17 of Wade Cunningham as they entered the first turn."

Jim Hinchliffe? I know James Hinchcliffe, but I never heard of Jim Hinchcliffe.

I’ve known James Hinchcliffe for years and I have never, ever, heard anyone – his father, his fans, his teammate, his girl, his PR people, other drivers, TV announcers, journalists, series officials, anyone – call him anything but James.

And it's not like he's some unknown. He's raced Formula Atlantic, A1-GP and Indy Lights, among other series. He's a seasoned TV colour commentator. He raced in every IndyCar Series race this season but one and won the Sunoco Rookie-of-the-Year award. I mean, he's a somebody.

So why in the world would the race director of the IndyCar series call him by a wrong name?

I really can't figure that one out.

– Okay, moving right along, Barnhart says that Hinchcliffe and Cunningham touched wheels and that is what sent Cunningham's car spinning toward the infield. He subsquently hit, or was hit by, cars driven by J.R. Hildebrand, Jay Howard and Townsend Bell.

The report as delivered by Barnhart is very detailed as to what happened in that sequence, which is as it should be.

However, he then goes on to describe what he calls "the next event," which was a collision involving cars driven by Vitor Meira, E.J. Viso, Charlie Kimball (among others) and Wheldon. But while the report is exact in what happened to start the first collision (contact between Hinchcliffe and Cunningham), it is vague as to what happened to start "the next event."

As has been observed by others, the purpose of the investigation was not to point the finger at the drivers. However, anyone who has watched the crash video is very aware that "the next event" was triggered by a car driven by Vitor Meira that started to spin for no apparent reason and the report should have been specific about that because it's only fair.

– It’s amazing that nobody other than Wheldon was killed in that crash. It shows how far racing car safety has come.

Wheldon’s bad luck was that he hit the fencing above the SAFER barrier and died when he hit a pole holding up the fence. Pippa Mann flew through the air about the same distance as Wheldon (about 100 yards) and her car was both on fire and upside down. She escaped with a burned finger. Hildebrand and Will Power also got airborne and were shaken up. Only Hildebrand and Mann were kept in hospital.

They say that the 2012 car will be safer for the drivers but you'd have to say that the old Dallara did a pretty good job in Vegas when the chips were down, wouldn't you?

2. Nico Hulkenberg was removed from the Formula One unemployment line last Friday when he was assigned a Force India seat for the 2012 season. However, Adrian Sutil immediately took his place and is now looking for work.

3. The Castrol Canadian Touring Car Championship has announced the creation of a new division for the 2012 season, the B-Spec Class.

B-Spec is designed to be an entry level and affordable category and highlights one of the fastest-growing segments of the automobile business. Eligible cars include the Honda Fit, Mazda2, Ford Fiesta, Fiat 500, Chevrolet Sonic, Kia Rio, Mini Cooper, Nissan Versa and Toyota Yaris.

The new B-Spec Class will feature showroom stock racing cars utilizing stock engines and chassis, fitted with a competition roll cage, racing seat and other safety equipment along with the approved Continental ExtremeContact race tires and Sunoco race fuel.

"This is an exciting new development for CTCC which will provide an entry level into professional racing in Canada," said John Bondar, president of the series.

"I can’t wait to see all of the new competitors on some of the most challenging tracks in Canada. I am proud to confirm that B-Spec will be included in all rounds of the 2012 CTCC season."

The connection between Kyle Busch and Stan Mikita

Just a final follow-up on the whole Richard Childress-Kyle Busch "fight" at Kansas last weekend.

I’ve been corresponding with several of the folks who keep in regular touch with me about this and one fellow in particular is not losing any sleep over the fact that 26-year-old Kyle got his butt kicked by a 66-year-old grandfather.

And I say two things in reply to that: 1, Childress is lucky that Busch didn’t fight back because he would have cleaned his clock, and 2, I think it’s admirable that Busch is obviously trying extremely hard this season to change his image from that of a snotty, haughty, arrogant little rich kid from Las Vegas to more of a regular guy that you might even like to go out for a beer with.

Now, the reason he didn’t haul off and slug Childress, who started the fight (or the assault, if this was a court of law), is because of two things – 1, he was already on probation because of an incident with Kevin Harvick a few weeks earlier and 2, he would have done some serious damage to Richard Childress and that would have been worse than anything.

I think he is seriously trying to change. Some say it’s because of his marriage. Others say Joe Gibbs’ sermons are finally getting through to him. Whatever, he’s certainly not the Bad Boy of NASCAR that he was a year ago.

But old reputations die hard. Here is a paraphrase of what one of my correspondents said about him in an email Tuesday:

"Despite him toning down his act, he is still regarded with some resentment and the reason is his aggressive driving style which puts others at more risk than necessary. Within the NASCAR fraternity I think the resentment comes from a lack of respect for the other drivers and their equipment, and because he’s successful."

Maybe I’m reading Kyle Busch wrong but his transformation reminds me of another guy who turned his career and reputation around many years ago and that was Stan Mikita of the Chicago Black Hawks.

When Mikita played junior with the St. Catharines Teepees, he was a holy terror and when he made the Black Hawks he played the same way. He was a dirty hockey player and he was despised by opposing players and fans alike. He spent a lot of time in the penalty box.

The story goes that Mikita returned home from a road trip once and his little daughter, who’d seen him on TV in the penalty box, asked him why spent so much time "sitting down." That, apparently, made such an impression on him that he stopped being dirty and became such a non-violent player that he went on to win the Lady Byng Trophy for sportsmanship.

Nice story – but not true.

According to an old friend of mine, who was one of the best hockey writers to ever sit down at a typewriter, Mikita was sitting in a barber’s chair in Hawaii during a post-season vacation when the barber noted that all his fingernails were bitten down to the quick.

"Why are you such a nervous guy?" the barber asked him and Mikita knew the answer: he was afraid for his life. He knew that the word was out around the league that somebody was going to get him; the other players were no longer going to tolerate his nonsense.

Tough was okay in the NHL of the 1960s; out-and-out dirty was not.

Maybe Mikita thought of his little daughter in that context, but it was a direct result of the conversation with that barber that Stan Mikita decided he’d do his best to go straight. It took him three or four seasons, but he finally won the respect of the guys he played against, as well as the league and the fans. And he won not one Lady Byng, but two.

Whatever it was that’s made Kyle Busch see the light – marriage, Gibbs or (who knows?) a threat of some kind from within the fraternity – his turnaround is a mirror image of Stan Mikita’s.

It might take a season or two, or even three, for people to accept it, but Busch the younger has put away childish things and is behaving like an adult. Not fighting back the other afternoon in Kansas is one of the first signs.

Robert Kubica released from hospital

WEEKEND HEADLINES:

1. Kubica on the road to recovery

2. IndyCar inconsistent on inconsistencies

1. Kubica should know by August if he can race F1 again

The good news today is that Renault Formula One driver Robert Kubica was discharged from hospital in Italy on Sunday, just short of three months after he was nearly killed in a rallying accident in early February.

The not-so-good news (as distinct from "bad" news) is that the jury is still way out on whether Kubica will ever be able to resume his F1 career.

Although understandable when it first happened, the word "if" continues to be used in any statement concerning Kubica’s ability to, a) get into an F1 car again and, b) drive it competitively.

The Polish driver, winner of the 2008 Grand Prix of Canada (a year after surviving a horrendous accident at Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve that still has veteran race-watchers shaking their heads at the memory), was driving in a fun rally in Italy when he lost control of his car and hit the end of a fence, the armco piercing the front of the car.

He suffered multiple fractures; his right hand was nearly severed.

The plan at the moment is for him to go home and rest up from his hospital stay. He will then report to a rehab facility in Italy to embark on a comprehensive program to regain the use of his hand. He’ll also start light physical training.

An answer to the question of whether he will ever race in F1 again is expected by August.

2. IndyCar walking a tightrope on penalties

When a referee issues a penalty in the NHL, or one in the NFL/CFL, all they have to do is cite the infraction and the length of time, or penalty yards, to be served(two minutes for holding, 15 yards for unnecessary roughness). They don’t have to explain their decisions.

If the infraction is sufficiently serious, the league can take further action and suspend the athlete for one game or 10. Nobody has to explain how that decision was reached.

Fans can scream bloody murder about the lousy officiating all they want. Their opinions matter not.

Which means the IndyCar series officials are treading on dangerous ground every time they go public with an explanation of why something was called, or not called.

The league found itself in a tight spot last year when Helio Castroneves had victory stolen from him in Edmonton when it was determined that he had blocked Scott Dixon on a restart late in the race.

The fact that there was no block should not have been of consequence. The call was made, right or wrong, and in this particular case it was wrong.

But instead of clamming up and letting people (like me) stew, IndyCar went to great pains to explain what Castroneves had done wrong. It just made matters worse because their convaluted excuse for calling the penalty has people (like me) now watching them like a hawk. The next time somebody does what Castroneves is alleged to have done, it will be documented (I can hardly for the Toronto race) and the IndyCar series will be made to look dumb, if not worse.

Now they’ve done it again. The sent Al Unser Jr. out last week to talk to certain select reporters to try to explain the unexplainable: how Castroneves drove like a battering ram through the field at the Grand Prix of Long Beach, hitting Justin Wilson and Will Power and ruining both their races. For this, he was let off scott-free.

Paul Tracy, meantime, returned to the series and hit Simona De Silvestor enough to spin her out and was immediately sent to the back of the pack as punishment.

Now, anybody with a brain knows that Tracy has been pigeon-holed, labelled, targeted - whatever you want to call it -   by race officials everywhere. His nickname is the "chrome horn." He’s also crashed about a million times during his career. So if he’s in a collison of any kind, any where, I guarantee you that the officials will immediately rule it was his fault, whether it was or not.

Castroneves, on the other hand, has not be known to be a rough racer and so – with the glaring exception of Edmonton – has usually been given a break or. in the case of Long Beach, breaks.

It’s the way it is, in the world of racing as well as the real world: certain people are deemed to be troublemakers, whether they are or not, and others aren’t, even when they are. We’ve all been to school at one time or other in our lives. You know what I’m saying.

But because of a fan uproar over what many saw as inconsistencies in the Long Beach officiating, the IndyCar people dispatched Unser Jr. to explain the reasons and they didn’t make much more sense than the explanation of blocking that was made last July in Edmonton.

I’m not going to go into what Unser says IndyCar officials consider avoidable contact and/or unavoidable contact because, at the end of the day, there are other currents at work (see my paragraphs above about labelling).

And there are also little nuggets like - well, chew on this, courtesy of Al Unser Jr.

". . . we figured [since] it had to do with his teammate (when Castroneves clobbered Power), maybe Roger (Penske) would have more influence on Helio in the races to come. More so than we would have with [giving him] a drive-through penalty."

As I said at the beginning, they should call the penalties and then just keep their mouths shut. Because every time they start talking, they just make matters worse.

ALMS Champion Simon Pagenaud will drive in this year's Indianapolis 500 for his sports car team, Highcroft Racing, which is gearing up to switch to the IndyCar Series in the next season or two. The Indy announcement will be made later this week.

Stock car racer J.R. Fitzpatrick of Cambridge was featured in an article in the Saturday Star. See the post below for a report on how he made out this weekend.

Why not a SAFER barrier for hockey?

When the NHL, in the interests of protecting its players, gets around to ordering bigger ice surfaces, I hope it has the sense to borrow a page from auto racing and install a SAFER barrier-type board system.

In fact, it could try this sooner rather than later on the stanchions that exist in all present-day rinks. Yes, they’re padded, but the padding is almost as rock-solid as the stanchion itself.

In any event, I thought about this Tuesday night as I watched a replay of Zdeno Chara’s hit in Montreal on Max Pacioretty, whose career might now be in jeopardy.

The SAFER system, which has now been installed at just about every big-league oval racing speedway in North America, was developed by engineers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in an effort to make racing accidents — well — safer.

 Financed by Tony George and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the SAFER barrier (Steel and Foam Energy Reduction barrier), which is also known as a soft wall, is constructed of polystyrene foam between an inner and outer shell. The barrier absorbs the energy when a racing car makes contact with it. The race cars go “into” the wall rather than bouncing off it. There is “give,” whereas before there was nothing but a solid wall.

Race cars are no longer damaged as badly as they were pre-SAFER, and the wear and tear on the race drivers has diminished significantly. In fact, no NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers or Indy car drivers have been killed as the result of a collision with a wall since Dale Earnhardt Sr. died 10 years ago and that happened before the first SAFER barrier was installed, at Indianapolis, in 2002.

It’s worked for auto racing and I can’t help but think it would do wonders for hockey. The "boards" would still be solid, so pucks would carom off them much as they do now, but the players would be better protected when crashing into them.

Max Pacioretty might still have been injured as the result of that hit into the boards/stanchion last night but he might not have suffered as serious an injury if there had been some type of SAFER system employed.