Norris McDonald's Auto Racing Blog

Why is F1 still planning to race at Bahrain in 2013?

I have been A.W.O.L. this week and much of last, and I apologize. This thing I have called a job keeps getting in the way.

Lots to talk about, so here goes.

Red Bull racing director Helmut Marko says Fernando Alonso was too “political” in 2012 and that’s why he lost the title by three points to Sebastian Vettel.

I suggest having a Lotus nearly land on his head might have had more to do with it.

Marko, of course, is a master politician who took a shot at Mark Webber the day before he slandered Alonso.

Marko learned his lessons well from Flavio Briatore, who was famous for hiring the drivers he managed after first launching psychological warfare against the guys he already had.

There is no apparent connection between Marko and Nico Hulkenberg, his current choice to partner Vettel in 2014, but you can bet there’s a link somewhere.

The current F1 is a wasp’s nest of conflicts-of-interest that likely couldn’t happen in most other professional sports. We live with it, though, because there isn’t an alternative.

Talking of F1, the auto racing websites and specialty periodicals are full of the usual non-stories you find at this time of year (“Bernie will step down from F1 post if thrown in jail” – ya think?) when there is a very serious story that could be reported.

And that story is: Why is F1 still planning to race in Bahrain in 2013?

If you Google “Bahrain Grand Prix” and “news,” the first 10 entries are all dated April 2012 when racing and Bahrain were last together.

And there’s the rub. Both the New York Times and National Post published op-ed articles in recent weeks about the situation there, which is worse than it was the last time anybody bothered to take a look. Dissent of any kind is not allowed, more protesters have been killed (about 100 at last count) and the jails are full of people who’ve dared to publicly challenge the regime of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

Now, last year, F1 was kind of caught in the middle, in that the schedule was set, the race was on and the violent demonstrations pretty much came out of nowhere. There was great international criticism of F1 and the FIA for going ahead anyway but, as I said, I don’t think they had much choice.

But the 2013 race? Bernie and Jean Todt and the rest of them have had a year to figure out a way to not go there and they haven’t done a thing. They sat on their hands and they should be ashamed.

F1 was decisive in the 1980s and refused to race in South Africa after 1985 because of apartheid. The much-maligned Jean-Marie Balestre, who was president of the FIA at the time, made that decision.

Where is the leadership today? Are not Ecclestone and Todt aware of what’s happening in Bahrain? And if not, why not?

The Bahrain Grand Prix will be a much bigger story this year than it was last and the people who run F1 are courting disaster by still planning to go ahead.

Moving right along, I have a friend in the U.S. who made his living managing a string of 30 or so small-town radio stations throughout the Midwest. He did that for about 15 years. No, he did not have a “job for life,” but he felt pretty comfortable in his position.

One day, the president of the company called and said he’d sold the stations to Gannett. My friend knew instantly that he was out of a job. The new owners would send in their own people to do things their way.

Which is why I, along with many others, was worried about the future of sports car racing in North America when it was announced late last year that the Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series and the American Le Mans Series would “merge” in 2014. Specifics about the class structures would be announced in January.

It turned out it wasn’t really a merger. It turned out the Grand Am Rolex Series, which is owned by NASCAR, had purchased the ALMS and I was concerned because of what happened to my friend: the new owners would want to do things their way.

I needn’t have worried. With the exception of the elimination of the poorly populated P1 class, everything else is status quo (GT classes in both series will continue in the new Grand Am, for instance) and I am very optimistic about the future.

NASCAR did not get to be the Goliath it is today by being stupid. I am confident the people in charge will do a good job with sports-car racing.

Short Takes:

— I’ll always think of it as the Busch Clash but that non-points, pre-Daytona 500 pole-winners-only invitational that went on to become the Budweiser Shootout will now be known as The Sprint Unlimited at Daytona. NASCAR calls it “the fans’ race.” Gee, I always thought they all were. . . .

— Carroll Shelby, Skip Barber, Bobby Rahal, Andy Porterfield and Bill Noble are the latest to be named to the SCCA’s Hall of Fame. . . .

—   A.J. Allmendinger and Regan Smith will split the driving chores at Phoenix Racing this Sprint Cup season. . . .

—   The Ontario Topless Sprints series, which was soft-launched a year or so ago, has an aggressive 2013 planned with five stand-alone events and a number of co-sanctioned races planned. The non-winged sprinters will start the season June 15 at the Chatham-area South Buxton Speedway. . . .

—   This in from Adam Saal, who handles PR for some of the drivers assigned to Woodbridge-based AIM Autosport:

“The No. 69 AIM Autosport Team FXDD and No. 61 R.Ferri AIM Motorsport Racing with Ferrari F458s wrapped up their first official event as a two-car GRAND-AM Rolex Sports Car Series team with positive results this past weekend at the Roar Before the Rolex 24 At Daytona test. The No. 69 AIM/FXDD Ferrari F458 and drivers Emil Assentato, Anthony Lazzaro, Nick Longhi and Guy Cosmo ended up ninth fastest overall in the GT ranks at the end of the three-day test while the debuting sister No. 61 AIM/R.Ferri Ferrari F458 improved in every session. Full-season No. 61 teammates Jeff Segal and Max Papis will be joined by Ferrari stalwarts Toni Vilander and Giancarlo Fisichella for the season-opening Rolex 24 at Daytona later this month.”

Fastest driver at the test was Vancouver’s Michael Valiante, who was behind the wheel of a Daytona Prototype entered by Michael Shank Racing. Scott Maxwell of Toronto was fastest in testing for the Continental Tire support race. . . .

—   Despite rumours to the contrary, Danica Patrick will be front and centre in Go Daddy commercials during this year’s Super Bowl telecast. . . .

—   At least four young Canadian drivers have signed on to compete in the U.S. Formula 2000 Series this year.

Once upon a time, in the 1970s and ‘80s, the world came to Canada to race in memorable series like Formula Atlantic and the Porsche Cup. Except for the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series, there is no national racing series in Canada – particularly a single-seat, open wheel series where these young drivers could hone their skills at home instead of heading for the U.S.

Surely there is someone out there with the skill, drive, ambition and connections to get such a series off the ground again. Guys like  David Deacon and Jack Christie did it before; can they (or someone else) not do it again?

Merry Christmas to all race fans

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

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

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

Fingers crossed on that one.

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

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

Meantime, enjoy the day. Joy to the World.

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

I think you'll like it. 

- Norris McDonald

NASCAR will use sports cars to fight IndyCar, F1

If you are in the ketchup business, you are in it to dominate the market. If need be, you will do just about anything and everything to put your competition out of business.

Same with beer, soft drinks or politics: if you’re a winner, your attitude is that this town ain’t big enough for the two (or more) of us.

Like it or not, this is also the way it is in big-league auto racing.

I’m not talking about the drivers, who obviously are out there to beat each other.

I’m talking about sanctioning bodies and I think this is the thinking behind NASCAR’s purchase recently of the American Le Mans Series.

There’s more to this than a simple buyout. Much more.

The competition for auto racing sponsorship mega-dollars, primarily, and bums-in-the-seats is heating up in the United States.

For years, NASCAR has had the No. 1 position all to itself but the ground is shifting.

Formula One is returning to the U.S., with a vengeance. After a promising start, F1 racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway stumbled badly: people really didn’t take to race cars going the wrong way at the fabled facility and the tire fiasco in 2005, when only six cars “raced,” and Michael Schumacher’s dumb attempt to “tie” with teammate Rubens Barrichello in 2002 turned the event into a joke.

After the 2007 race, F1 left the U.S. again — this time with its tail between its legs.

Next month, F1 returns to the States for a race at a purpose-built circuit outside Austin, Tex., and you can almost feel the excitement in the air all the way up here. There are only a few tickets left for the inaugural event. It is going to look fabulous on television. The Circuit of the Americas will rank right up there with Abu Dhabi and some of the other, newer, GP venues in the world.

And in about seven months, a second U.S. Grand Prix will be held, this one through the streets of several picturesque towns in New Jersey with the New York City skyline in the background.

This will be a powerful one-two punch.

Talking about television — there was a reference several paragraphs ago — Formula One has just signed a new deal with NBC to take race, qualifying and practice coverage away from the Fox-owned Speed Channel, starting in 2013. Bernie Ecclestone is delighted, and said he expects NBC to “promote Formula One to a level not seen before in the United States” across three platforms: over-the-air, cable and digital.

Although it has had its ups and downs, NBC is the most powerful and influential television network in the U.S., followed by its two old-time rivals ABC and CBS. Fox and its subsidiaries are way off in the distance.

Meantime, after years of struggle because of a civil war and coupled with bad management, the IZOD IndyCar Series has regained its sea legs and is embarking on an expansion program in 2013 that will see double-header races promoted in three of North America’s largest markets: Detroit, Toronto and Houston. Led by CEO Randy Bernard, IndyCar is making serious waves again.

The return of Formula One with not one but two races in a little more than half a year and a rejuvenated IndyCar series spells bad news for NASCAR.

It’s not that it won’t hold its traditional audience but the potential for NASCAR to grow is substantially limited in the face of increased competition, particularly in the boardrooms of Madison Avenue.

And anybody who knows anything about business is aware that it’s not good enough to just make a profit any longer; it’s the rate of growth and ability to attract new business that counts.

Now, NASCAR has the oval track crowd in its pocket. But the road-racing audience — that’s another kettle of fish.

NASCAR created the Grand American Road Racing Series in 1999 and took the Rolex Sports Cars Series under its wing in 2000 when the U.S. Road Racing Championship went out of business. Much like it's handled its Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Camping World truck series championships, NASCAR concentrated on cost-effective sports car racing rather than high-tech. The result was club racing. The people doing the racing had a fine time but the product was not particularly spectator-friendly. This year’s Daytona 24 was a fine example: a good race with zero people there to watch it.

The Grand Am has been in competition with the much more exotic and high-tech American Le Mans Series, which puts on good races in front of sizable crowds. But much like the Indy car war, sports car racing was stymied when it came to growth because of two series instead of just one. As IndyCar has benefitted from unification, so could sports car racing — if some one or some thing wanted to make it happen.

Don Panoz, who started the ALMS, told me once that he had talked to NASCAR about unification but had balked “because they wanted to run everything." NASCAR finally made Panoz an offer he couldn’t refuse and unification will happen in 2014 under the Grand Am banner.

Since the announcement, many people have speculated about the makeup and direction of the new series and there has been an underlying suggestion that NASCAR will “dumb it down” so it’s much like the present Grand Am Series.

I thought so initially too. I’ve since changed my mind — and here’s why.

NASCAR bought the ALMS in order to be in control of what will eventually be a very high-tech sports car racing series to compete directly against the IndyCar Series and to blunt any inroads Formula One might have designs on making into the boardrooms of corporate America.

To do otherwise would be folly. And NASCAR has already indicated it will be going in that direction by meeting in Paris with officials of the Le Mans-centric Automobile Club of the West, which organizes and makes the rules for the annual 24-hour race.

NASCAR can revert to being a growth-oriented corporation by being as upscale and as high tech as it can in sports car racing.

And by so doing, it can cut IndyCar and F1 off at the pass.

Grand Am buys ALMS, wins sports car war

The announcement today – Wednesday – of a new North American sports car racing series could either be good news for the sport or bad news and I’m betting it will be more the latter than the former.

The American Le Mans Series and the Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series will officially become one when the announcement is made. Although initial reports talked about a merger, it has since been confirmed that what’s happening, in fact, is the sale of the ALMS to Grand Am.

A merger is one thing. A merger is when two parties come together to create something that includes the best of both. A sale is when one party purchases the other and gets to call all the shots.

Much has been written in recent days about what the idealists in the crowd would like to see happen with this new series. The idealists kinda like the way the ALMS has been working and would dearly love to see the GT Class, in particular, included in the new series.

But I have news. The new series will be the present Grand Am Series with maybe – maybe – more participants. The Grand Am organization, which is owned by the France family/NASCAR, is not going to throw any of its current competitors under the bus in order to make anybody on the "other side" feel better. It’ll be the Grand Am way, or the highway.

I did an interview a few years ago with the saviour of Mosport (now Canadian Tire Motorsport Park) and the founder of the American Le Mans Series, Don Panoz. The ALMS and the Grand Am were both formed in the late 1990s as a result of the mess made of North American sports car racing by a guy named Andy Evans, and have been seen as competitors in much the same way as the Indy Racing League and the Champ Car World Series were during their "civil war."

During the interview, I asked Panoz if he’d ever tried to "make peace" with the Grand Am so that there could be one, great, sports car series on this continent and he replied that he had.

"We’ve talked from time to time," he said, and then asked to go off the record. "They want to run everything," he said. "They want to do it all their way and I won’t go for that."

Apparently, Don Panoz has now reached a point where he will go for that.

Which is understandable, considering the way the ALMS has evolved in recent years and which has, as a result, undoubtedly cost him a lot of money.

Sports car racing is made up of classes, with the unlimited prototype class – called Prototype 1, or P1 – at the top of the heap. The problem is that for several years now, there has not been any manufacturer factory teams in P1 and the class has been propped up by privateers.

While the ALMS has prospered in the Grand Touring class, with factory entries from Corvette, Ferrari, BMW and others producing tight, exciting races, the lack of glamour-puss entries in P1 from manufacturers like Audi has hurt the series.

Although some might disagree, the decision to brand the ALMS as a "green" racing series has had mixed results. Auto racing is loud and gritty (despite the best efforts of F1) and is most popular when presented that way. Many people were put off by the goody two-shoes promotion of the series as being "clean racing."

And then there was the disastrous decision two years ago to put all of the races on the Internet, rather than continue on live television. Suddenly, the ALMS became an invisible series to all but truly hard-core fans.

It didn’t help that the Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series races were all broadcast live on Speed Channel.

Now, it’s always been apparent that the ALMS is a bigger draw than the Grand Am when it comes to people actually going to the races. Last January’s Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona Grand Am race at Daytona Speedway attracted exactly zero spectators. None. Two months later at the ALMS 12 Hours of Sebring, the crowd was so big that it was difficult to get inside the circuit.

So the Grand Am organization might be inclined to accept some ALMS help in the area of marketing and promotion of the new series, but that’s about all.

Sure, some of the ALMS tracks – Canadian Tire MP, Lime Rock, etc. – will be part of the new series, but other than that, the ALMS as we’ve know it will soon be nothing but a memory.

And although there might be some platitudes mouthed about continuing the great traditions of the ALMS and its connection to the Automobile Club de l’Ouest and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, there is no way NASCAR will be taking direction from anyone, much less some sports car club in France.

Grand Am/NASCAR is the big dog now and they’ll do things their way. They won the war, so we’d better get used to it.

Did Woodbridge seal AIM deal with Ferrari?

When I enjoyed my first conversation of the 2012 season with AIM Autosport of Woodbridge team principal Ian Willis, it was in February at the Canadian Motorsports Expo and he was telling me how thrilled he was to be running full-time in the Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series with – wait for it – a Ferrari.

Willis and AIM are no strangers when it comes to big-league sports car racing, having campaigned a Daytona Prototype for years with drivers like Mark Wilkins, Bruno Junqueira and Burt and Brian Frisselle.

But the Ferrari deal came out of the blue when an old friend, Grand Am driver Nick Longhi, telephoned Willis to chat.

"I’ve known Nick since he was an instructor at the Bridgestone Racing School," Willis said. "He called to say that he and others were working on a deal to run a Ferrari in the GT class of the Rolex series.

"Nick operated the Ferrari driving experience up at Mont Tremblant and is very well connected within the Ferrari network. He thought of us because he knows we’re capable of winning in the Grand Am series (two Daytona Prototype victories in 2008, for example) and he figured we would be a great fit.

"He’s also worked with (AIM drivers) Emil Assentato and Jeff Segal and so everything just seemed to fall into place."

 

 

Willis said it wasn’t a slam-dunk, though; that other teams were in the mix. In the end, it was the municipality where their business is located that might very well have sealed the deal for them.

"Ferrari is Italy’s team, it’s Italy’s brand," he said. "Woodbridge, where we're based, is 50 per cent Italian-speaking and that really opened the door for us."

He said he and the drivers went to Italy to get the car and they did a shakedown test at Fiorano, the official Ferrari test track.

"It’s hallowed ground," Willis said. "Emil (Assentato) sent me a note afterward and said it was like a country priest visiting the Vatican. Me? I just kept pinching myself."

So that was in February. The next time I talked to Willis was a month or so ago on Bayview Ave. in midtown Toronto. He and his sweetheart were out for a stroll with their young pup dog in tow, or the dog had them in tow, I’m not sure which. In any event, we talked about the season to date.

"Our goal is to win the championship," he said at the time (as of today, with two races remaining, both in September, Segal and Assentato are in first place in the GT driver standings, AIM is in first place among teams and Ferrari leads all manufacturers ).

"We’re on a one-year contract and our long-range plan is to grow to two cars for 2013. We’re working toward a Canadian sister car for the one we have now, which has an all-American lineup (Assentato is from New York and Segal is from Miami and Philadelphia).

"The nice thing about being Canadian is there are a lot of good Canadian drivers to choose from. Daniel Morad drove for us. There’s also Robbie Wickens, James Hinchcliffe, Andrew Ranger, Jacques Villeneuve, Mark Wilkins. They’re all good drivers.

"But right now, that’s pretty far way. Our focus is to get a championship for this car and our drivers. That’s our priority. Hopefully, the rest will fall into place."

The last race of the Rolex season is at Lime Rock, Conn., the weekend of Sept. 28-29. After that, Wilkins might know more about next year.

I’ll phone him up then and find out. And I’ll bring you up to date, too.

Fond memories of Flamboro Speedway

Back in the early to mid-1960s, I used to attend races at Flamboro Speedway out near Hamilton.

A lot.

 In those days, I might be at Mosport during the day on Saturday to watch  practice and qualifying for Can-Am or Formula Fords and then bomb out of there by 4:30 or 5 in the afternoon so I could get over to Flamboro in time for an evening of supermodified racing. Then I’d be back at Mosport Sunday for the feature event of the weekend.

It was a great life.

I went to Flamboro with my best friend at the time, Rick Clare, and his brother and my sister (they dated for awhile) and assorted other friends and acquaintances.

The racing was edge-of-your-seat stuff, with guys like Harvey Lennox, Joe Hylwka, Jack McCutcheon (he had Woody Woodpecker painted on his car), Howie Scannell, Gary Witter, Jack Greedy and countless others screaming around the quarter mile of asphalt.

I always used to tell people that if they wanted to see great driving, they should go to Mosport; if they wanted to see great racing, they had to go to Flamboro.

Of course, there were other attractions at Flamboro besides the supers. The hobby class attracted upwards of 50 (or more) cars a night and Dizzy Dean Murray, the track announcer, worked as hard or harder talking up their heats and feature as he did the headline division.

"And here they come, ladies and gentlemen, Canada’s future Indianapolis 500 drivers, out on the track for tonight’s jalopy feature brought to you by Wheelspin News. Pick up your copy at the newstand near the hot dog counter and don’t forget to read MY COLUMN." (Dizzy was not above promoting himself when it came to patter . . .)

One night, I think it was in 1969, the U.S. Auto Club midgets towed in for a show and Bobby (Two Gun) Tattersall won the feature over a hard-charging Jimmy Carruthers.

There were several interesting things about that meet:

First, the USAC had recommended that all cars mount an enclosed roll cage but it had not yet made them mandatory. So you had about half the cars with the drivers fully protected (both Tattersall and Carruthers drove modgets with full cages) and the other half with truly open cockpits and just a roll bar behind the driver. Old campaigners like Les Scott and Mel Kenyon were still out there racing "bare headed."

Second, both Tattersall (above, in a pre-roll cage car) and Carruthers survived what was a very dangerous era in car racing, only to die of cancer. "Tat’ passed in 1971 and Carruthers in ‘75. In fact, Carrruthers, who'd made it to Indy by that time, won the USAC Silver Crown championship that season; he clinched the title six weeks before his death when he finished third in the Hoosier Hundred on the dirt mile at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.

So those are some of my memories of Flamboro Speedway. Randy Spencer, a journalist who works tirelessly to preserve the heritage of short-track oval racing in Ontario, is looking for some of yours.

Spencer issued a media release this week announcing the creation of the Flamboro Stadium and Speedway Hall of Fame, Museum and Archives. The first inductees will be enshrined this November (I nominate McCutcheon – as Spencer himself has written, McCutcheon won the very first feature when the track opened 51 season ago).

Writes Spencer:

"We are looking for anything interesting for the museum, including photos, old newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, old programs and racing newspapers and personal items such as driver trophies, race suits, helmets and anything Flamboro-related that we can display.

"We will accept permanent donations or anything on loan to be returned. Items will be posted on our website as well as for display at the track. Also looking for any help by way of sponsorship to help with anything from the cost of producing the large scrapbooks to setting up the website or any of the other worthwhile projects that will happen over the coming months."

I wish Randy the best of luck with this project.

For more information, go to Ontario Oval or to the project’s current website

Jerry Grant, Gordon Harrison united in death

 

GORDON HARRISON IS ONE OF TWO MARSHALS (left of photo) BESIDE MOSPORT TRACK

When the news was emailed to the world Monday afternoon that 10-time Indianapolis 500 starter Jerry Grant had died, the first thing I thought about was Mosport in June, 1966, and a guy named Gordon Harrison.

At the time, Grant was a hard-charging sports car racer from the Pacific Northwest who’d made two starts at Indy but had yet to give NASCAR a try. He was a barnstorming racer who’d enter just about any sports car race anywhere and one of his stops that year was at Mosport for the Player’s 200.

He was driving the same Lola T70 he’d raced to victory two weeks previously in May in a U.S. Road Racing Championship event at the Bridgehampton circuit on Long Island, N.Y. The competition there had been stiff, but the Player’s race attracted more of an international entry list and he was up against drivers like Bruce McLaren, Chris Amon and Jackie Stewart as well as Canadians Ludwig Heimrath, Eppie Wietzes, Nat Adams, John Cannon and John Cordts, among others.

Shortly after the start, coming down the hill from Turn 2 on the opening lap and heading toward Turn 3, a section of the course that’s known internationally as one of the hardest to navigate in all of global road racing (in fact, the famous German F1 and sports car driver Manfred Winkelhock met his end there), Grant lost control of the Lola and went flying off the circuit.

Unfortunately, Harrison – a non-professional racing driver who was acting as a track-side marshal that day – was standing right in the path of the car and was killed instantly. He was 37 years old.

Grant was taken to hospital suffering from shock, although it was reported that he was not aware at the time that Harrison was dead. A photo of the dazed-looking Grant, wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the ground beside his wrecked car, was sent by wire around the world.

It’s said that auto racing is a dangerous sport but it’s nowhere near as dangerous for any of the participants these days as it was back then. Look at the picture at the top of this column, taken during the pace lap of that Player's 200 on June 4, 1966, and one of the two marshals beside the track at left is Gordon Harrison.

Guys (and women, too) like Harrison thought nothing of standing trackside to display the blue passing flag to racers who were holding up faster cars behind them.

In fact, Harrison and two other marshals at the time, Wayne Jeffery and Gord Salisbury, were called"Bull Fighters" for their skill and daring standing almost on the racing surface to use their flags to keep the contest fair.

As a result of the dreadful accident that day, the marshals were moved back from the track and nowadays at road courses like Mosport (now called Canadian Tire Motorsport Park), many of them do their flagging from platforms.

Grant, of course, went on to become the first driver to turn a lap in an Indy car at more than 200 miles an hour but, like contemporary Lloyd Ruby, he had horrible luck on the race track.

For instance, earlier in 1966, at the 12 Hours of Sebring, he and co-driver Dan Gurney were winning when their Ford GT conked out. The same thing happened to them that year at the 24 Hours of Le Mans when a mechanical issue sidelined the car when they were leading at the 21-hour mark.

In NASCAR, he went from 43^rd to fifth in the 1967 Daytona 500 before dropping out . The year before, he finished fifth in the Dixie 400 at Atlanta.

Now, in all the online obituaries and tributes, much is being made of his disqualification from the 1972 Indy 500. The official version as to why this happened was sent out Monday afternoon by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway media department:

"Driving the purple Mystery Eagle as teammate to Bobby Unser on Dan Gurney's All-American Racers team, Grant led at the 188-lap mark when he had to pit to replace a tire which was losing air. Instead of pitting in his stall, he went to the adjoining one of Unser, who had retired much earlier in the day. Whether or not Grant actually took on any fuel from Unser's refueling tank is up for discussion, but the hoses were momentarily hooked up, and it became known that the tank in his own pit was apparently empty, the maximum allotment of 275 gallons having been exhausted.

"While Grant did finish the 500 miles, taking the checkered flag in second place behind Mark Donohue, officials subsequently disallowed Grant's final 12 laps, thus dropping him from second to 12^th."

Wikipedia reports that Grant "overshot his pit" and that’s what put him in Unser’s stall.

And I say baloney. I was right there in the room shortly after the race when Gurney was trying to convince U.S. Auto Club officials that, yes, Grant had taken on a bit of fuel from Unser’s tank but, honest officer, it had all been a big mistake because they really, really thought Grant had been connected to his own tank.

Grant, who knew the jig was up, sat on a sofa with a bemused look on his face, his balaclava perched on the top of his head (which looked very cool but covered up the fact that he had rapidly thinning hair and wasn’t wearing his usual hairpiece).

The fact of the matter is that Jerry Grant had to pit because he was out of fuel. He had used up all the fuel in his own pit tank. He had to get more to finish the race and the team directed him to stop in Unser’s pit because that was where the fuel was. Sure, they changed a tire but that was essentially to cover up the fact they were adding fuel. They were just hoping nobody would notice.

Gurney, one of the greatest racing drivers of his generation, was not above trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes. At the 1967 F1 Grand Prix of Canada at Mosport, he convinced race officials to allow him extra practice time because, he said, there was a bad vibration in the front of his car and he needed the time to determine if it was a wheel problem or whether something was seriously the matter with the chassis. (You could do those sorts of things in those days.)

Of course, he ‘fessed up years later that, in fact, he was trying to determine whether to change the engine in his car and his "tire test" had been nothing more than a ruse to give him more time to make up his mind. . . .

Jerry Grant was 77 when he died on Sunday. Like so many from that era, he could drive and race just about anything, and race it well. There’s not many of them left.

Postscript:

I mentioned Jerry Grant in a column I wrote a month or so ago about bicycle helmets. I wrote that he’d influenced me because he was a pioneer in the wearing of a crash helmet while riding a motorcycle. I hadn’t thought of him in years.

Also, four days before that fateful day in 1966, Jackie Stewart and Jerry Grant had survived an opening lap pileup at Indianapolis that damaged half the cars in the 33-car starting field. They'd lobbied for a standing start in the Player’s 200 instead of the rolling start that had been planned, arguing that it would be safer. Organizers left it up to a vote of drivers and they lost, 16 to 11. Whether the bunched-up field as the result of the "flying start" had anything to do with Grant losing control on that first lap is something we’ll never know.

ALMS has Montreal in Ontario

Here is my rant for today:

Years ago, when the Toyota Atlantic Series was primarily Canadian, with numerous Canadian drivers and a Canadian sponsor, the marketing and the public relations were handled by a U.S. company.

So early one season, I received a fax (remember those?) of the entry list for the Atlantic race in support of the CART Long Beach Grand Prix. It had a whole bunch of American drivers from some of the most obscure places in that country, identified by their hometowns. For example, “Jimmy Vasser, Canoga Park, Calif.”

It also had a whole bunch of Canadian drivers — Jacques Villeneuve Sr., Trevor Siebert, Claude Bourbonnais and Stephane Proulx, among others — from one place: “Canada.”

I naturally had to write a column suggesting that it wouldn’t be all that hard to list the hometowns of those Canadian drivers — they’re not from Mars, you know?

But I also suggested that perhaps the reason the American PR firm hadn't gone to that trouble was because the employees who prepared the list were so geographically challenged that perhaps they didn’t know enough about Canada to realize there were actually towns and cities up this way. 

Over the years, I — like other Canadians — have continued to be bemused (shocked is too strong a word) by the ignorance displayed toward this country by many Americans.

I won’t embarrass him by naming him, but the guy who runs one of the four major auto racing series in North America said these exact words to me two years ago when I was talking to him about TV coverage of his series: “You don’t get ESPN2 in Canada?”

And I have an American friend — a good friend, in fact, whom I wish I could spend more time with and who is no dummy when it comes to Canada — who has a stepdaughter who knows absolutely nothing, and I mean, nothing about this place.

It’s not her fault; Canada is not important enough to most American educators for it to be included in curriculums. And I don’t necessarily think it’s ignorance on the part of many American adults; I think it’s disinterest. They could care less.

I accept this, for the most part.

But here I come again with the race entry list thing.

Some things never change, apparently.

The American Le Mans Series has issued the list of the 36 cars that are entered in the upcoming race at Road America. I looked at it out of curiosity because there are seven or more cars entered there than showed up for the race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park a few weeks ago and I was wondering where they’d come from.

And then I started looking for the names of Canadian drivers. I found Tony Burgess from Toronto and Kyle Marcelli from Barrie and then I was stopped cold by this:

Kuno Wittmer, Montreal, ON.

Does anybody know how something like that can happen?

Schumi to Ferrari? Allmendinger rumours

Friday morning musings:

1. Ferrari has let the option to pick up Felipe Massa’s contract for 2013 lapse, which means he will not be in the team next year.

By interviewing Mark Webber for the job, Ferrari tipped that it’s looking for a solid second banana rather than a young speedster who would make Fernando Alonso uncomfortable.

There’s another veteran in F1 who doesn’t have a contract for next year. He’s fast — but not fast enough to really challenge Alonso — and he has strong ties to Ferrari.

I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that Michael Schumacher could sign on for 2013 and then ride off into the sunset for the last time wearing Ferrari red.

2. A.J. Allmendinger has still not said anything about what made him flunk the NASCAR drug test. There are suggestions it had to do with emphetamines and his business people are pushing the “accidental” angle — that somehow, something he ingested legally put him over the line and it was all an accident. I’m hearing it was something else entirely. And that’s the problem: when there is no clear explanation forthcoming, the rumours start. Speak up, A.J., before it’s too late.

3. Danica Patrick told the media at Indianapolis Motor Speedway Thursday that she wants to do the “double” next U.S. Memorial Day weekend — the Indianapolis 500 as well as the Coca-Cola 600 — if the logistics can be worked out and she can get a good ride at Indy. She’ll be driving in the Sprint Cup series for Tony Stewart next year and he’s done it previously, so if she wants to try I can’t see him standing in her way. Who knows? Perhaps he’ll start laying the groundwork for the eventual establishment of an Indy car team to compliment his NASCAR team after he retires from driving. If Roger, Chip and maybe Michael can do it, why not him?

4. JR Motorsports has launched a contest around everybody’s favourite all-‘round Canadian driver, Ron Fellows, who will be competing for them at Watkins Glen and at Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in the Nationwide Series in August. Go to www.JRMracing.com or www.Fellows5.com for contest details and questions. The Grand Prize is a three-day driving experience package at Ron Fellows Performance Driving School at Spring Mountain Motor Resort and Country Club outside Las Vegas.

5. While a lot of attention will be on Paul Tracy in the Daytona Prototype class this afternoon in the Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, let’s not lose track of the fact that the AIM Autosport of Woodbridge Ferrari driven by Jeff Segal and Emil Assentato is very likely going to win the GT class in that race. Segal will start the race with the best race-win record in the series as well as the GT class championship points lead. Segal and the first-year AIM Autosport Team FXDD Ferrari program also have a series-best six GT podium finishes in the season’s first eight races, with only one result out of the top four all year.

6. I’ve been in the newspaper (and radio and TV) biz for longer than I can even remember. One of the things I was taught by my very first city editor, Jim Pauk, was to use language that people can understand. Ergo (that’s a fancy word for “therefore”), I can’t figure out why modern communication specialists (they used to be called “reporters”) have to copy down, or repeat, everything the way it’s written or spoken. This is particularly true when it comes to medical explanations. These days, you would think we are all doctors, the way things come out in the paper and on the web. Example. Charlie Kimball apparently crashed during an IndyCar test at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course.  All the stories are reporting that he suffered a fracture of the fifth metacarpal of his right hand. Okay, I’m not stupid. I suspect he has a broken hand. But why not just say it? What the heck if a metacarpal? Same thing with broken legs. Why not say, “broken leg?” Why say, “fracture of the femur?”

7. Chevrolet announced Thursday that its NASCAR Nationwide Series car for 2013 will be the Camaro. The Camaro, as we all know, is built in Oshawa. Wouldn’t it be neat if the Nationwide Series and the Grand Am Rolex Series raced a double-header at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park next summer? Maybe everybody employed at GM Oshawa would get a free ticket so they could cheer on “Canada’s car!”

8. Okay – so this is my scenario for 2013: Continuing student unrest in Montreal forces F1 to review the Canadian Grand Prix. Its future there could be in jeopardy. So Montreal needs a new headline event for Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve. How about a NASCAR Sprint Cup race? This means the Nationwide Series event would be free to move to Canadian Tire Motorsport Park. The Grand Am Rolex could support both. The NASCAR trucks could double-head with the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series at CTMP. Add the American Le Mans Series and the Canadian motorcycle championship and Summer 2013 at the facility north of Bowmanville could be non-stop action. I’m dreaming – but it’s a nice dream. (Oh, I have a sollution to the F1 problem. Coming Monday.)

On racing DQs, podiums and NASCAR at Mosport

Corvette Racing, westbound on the 407 at 6:15 p.m. July 22, its work done.

Fernando Alonso won the German Grand Prix (details here), Helio Castroneves won the IZOD IndyCar race in Edmonton (details here) and Klaus Graf and Lucas Luhr won the American Le Mans Series Grand Prix of Mosport (details and rolling blog here).

I was at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park all weekend for the ALMS, so didn’t see the F1 or IndyCar races, other than watching the highlights on TV. So here are just some meanderings on a Monday morning about what took place over the weekend.

1. The ALMS race ended on schedule at 2:45 p.m. and the podium ceremony was held immediately after. Jorge Bergmeister and Patrick Long stood on the top step of the podium as winners of the GT class in their Porsche 911 GT3.

They got to spray the champagne and were interviewed by three different television reporters as well as the track’s PA announcer. They went with the other winners to the post-race press conference and answered questions. Then, presumably, they went off to celebrate.

At a little after 5 p.m., more than two hours later, I was putting away my computer after filing my race story to the Star’s sports department and putting the finishing touches to the online blog I’d kept going most of the weekend when a photographer hurried into the media room and said these words to an ALMS official:

"What’s the 45 car still doing in tech?"

The "45 car" was the winning car in the GT class.

The ALMS official said he didn’t know but would go and find out.

"Mind if I tag along?" I asked, and away we went.

Half way to the tech centre, we ran into the series’ main tech inspector who looked at my official friend and shook his head.

"DQ’d," he said, meaning disqualified.

What was the problem?

"Failed the stall test," the tech inspector said.

The stall test on a normally aspirated engine is done by blocking off the air-intake valves and trying to start it. If there’s no air getting in, it can’t start.

It started – which meant air was getting in somewhere; Bergmeister and Long might have had an advantage from the extra air during the race.

So the second-place car in GT – the Ferrari of Van Overbeek and Sharp – moved up a notch and the car that finished fourth in class on track, the BMW of Joey Hand of Sacramento, Calif., and Dirk Muller of Germany, became third in the official results.

2. The podium ceremony at ALMS races is nuts.

Twenty six cars were entered at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park this weekend and each car had two drivers so there were 52 drivers in the race. There were five classes of cars — P1, P2, PC, GT and GTC. Each class rewards the first three cars (see where this is going?)

So 28 drivers showed up for the podium ceremony. There would have been 30, except there were only two cars entered in P2.

Anyway, more than half the drivers in the field were on the podium and that seems – to me, anyway – to be a little much.

3. Klaus Graf has won the pole for this race the last three years and has gone on to win the race each time and good for him. Muscle Milk Pickett Racing is a top-notch team and his co-drivers, Lucas Luhr this year and last, and Romain Demas the year before that, have been formidable teammates.

But, you know, Graf doesn’t have any real competition. It’s been a walk in the park. If the ALMS wants to grow, and to thrive, it’s got to talk someone – Roger Penske, maybe? – or some manufacturer – Audi, maybe? – to step up and take this guy and this team on.

Otherwise, it’ll get boring.

4. Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, like all the other motorsport entities around, won’t issue attendance figures. But there was a big crowd on hand for the race. On driver’s left, going from turn four down to where the track starts to sweep up into Moss Corner, people were standing shoulder to shoulder behind the fence and I haven’t seen that for years.

And that was the road course. As I drove out of the place Saturday night, I was surprised to see the Mosport Speedway stands were packed solid (much like Merrittville’s were when I was there three weeks ago. Who wants to say that short-track racing isn’t thriving in southern Ontario?)

In any event, the big draw Saturday night at the Mosport oval was the OSCAAR late model stock cars and they, my friends, are rockets. You should check to see where they’re running next and take in a show. Those guys in those cars were well worth it.

5. It’s plain that the new owners of the old Mosport are hot on the trail of a NASCAR race (will it be the trucks, or the Nationwide stockers, or – dare I dream – the Cup cars that come?)

In any event, there have to be 43 pit stalls to accommodate any of those series, which means the old control tower that has stood since 1962 will either have to come down or be moved and that could happen sooner rather than later if a NASCAR race is to be reality in 2013.

The new corporate centre is being built as we speak. Canadian Tire Motorsport Park is lookin’ pretty good.

5A. If a NASCAR race becomes reality, will the Grand Am Rolex Series be far behind? And will the Grand Am and the ALMS be able to co-exist at the same facility? Just wondering.

6. When I heard about (and later saw) Sebastien Vettel’s off-track pass of Jenson Button near the end of the German Grand Prix Sunday (he was subsequently penalized 20 seconds, moving him from second to fifth – although, like Bergmeister/Long at Mosport it was after the podium ceremony – the first thing I thought of was Alex Zanardi’s pass of Bryan Herta in a CART race at Laguna Seca in 1996.

In Germany, they had stewards to look at the circumstances and determine a penalty, if any. In California in the Nineties, Zanardi’s audacity caught everyone by surprise and it was only much later that people were saying that it shouldn’t have counted, that Zanardi left the race track to make the pass.

Even today, Herta will tell you it was illegal (you decide: take a look here).

7. I don’t know what D.J. Kennington of St. Thomas has been putting in his coffee but at Edmonton Sunday he won his fourth consecutive NASCAR Canadian Tire Series race – the 15^th victory of his career.

Kennington was running third when, during a late-race restart, the first and second-place cars of Scott Steckly of Milverton and J.R. Fitzpatrick of Cambridge collided, allowing Kennington to take the lead.

Jason Hathaway of Dutton, Ont., finished second – he’s having a great year – while Trevor Seibert of Williams Lake, B.C., was third. Steckly recovered to finish fourth.

8. Jordan Szoke of Brantford won the Mopar Canadian Superbike Championship round at Atlantic Motorsport Park at the weekend, with Jodi Christie of Keene, Ont., second and Frank Rombino of Kleinburg third. The motorcycles will be at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park in August.

9. Rinaldo (Dindo) Capello has called it at a day. The sports car racer with an astounding record - two-time ALMS champion, 23 ALMS victories, three 24 Hours of Le Mans victories, five Sebring 12 Hours wins (including 2012) and three ELMS triumphs - is 48 and says his work is done.

Hey, maybe he'll be able to enjoy life a little. Years ago, when Mosport announcer Jim Martyn and I had a radio show on the Fan, Capello arrived for an interview and said he was starving. An aide was dispatched to a nearby restaurant to pick up a chicken caesar salad. Capello wouldn't start to eat it until he'd picked out every single one of the croutons.

10. Speedtv.com is reporting that Lotus will withdraw from the IndyCar series at season's end but CEO Randy Bernared says they have four years remaining on a five-year contract and will have to negotiate a settlement. Oh? If Lotus hasn't been able to afford to put any additional moneys into its dismal engine program, who thinks it will have any to buy its way out of its commitment?