Houston! New York of the South! Los Angeles of the East! Venezuela of the North! What better place for a high-speed, high-but-street-legal-octane celebration of delicious petrochemicals? There is no better place. Welcome to the
All-American Good Clean Fun Indycar Racing Series Rounds 9 and 10: Shell and Pennzoil Grand Prix of Houston Presented by the Greater Houston Honda Dealers
Trax fax
Length: 1.7 miles
Number of turns: 10 (the equivalent of 2.5 Indianapolis Motor Speedways)
Track record: 1:00.45, Takuma Sato, Dallara-Honda (2013)
Steps forward / steps back for Indycar Series ratio: 1:2
Sam Houston wearing gigantic hat
Mad dogs and Englishmen
The good ship Indycar has sailed past the Scylla and Charybdis of bad publicity and poor administration; avoided the terrifying gaze of the Polyphemus TV ratings; sent Nausicaa packing for Switzerland – and now finds itself navigating the doldrums of mid-summer Nobodycareseus.
But you care! You care so much you've opened this thread, looked past its gaudy pictures and even, upon seeing the word “Indycar” in the Racing Comments index, remembered what Indycar is! Do you know why? Because there's NO AMERICAN FOOTBALL ON. The fact that there is NO AMERICAN FOOTBALL ON will give TV ratings a 20% boost, make paying spectators in Houston feel 15 degrees cooler, dim the midday sun to a pleasant shade of Spring Morning, and delete from the memory all but the most positive impressions of the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix.
NO AMERICAN FOOTBALL ON will make watching a race in Houston in late June less like having a dog breathe in your face all day (thanks to Marshall Pruett for that one) and more like spraying your whole body with a water mister infused with aerosolized kittens.
NO AMERICAN FOOTBALL ON will, at the very least, provide a lockstep excuse from series officials should none of those things above come to pass.
What NO AMERICAN FOOTBALL ON will unfortunately not help us with is the clashing of both Indycar races with only sports series bigger than the National Football League, which is of course the soccer World Cup. Rats!
Weekend schedule
(With helpful additional soccer entries for Europeans, South Americans, Central Americans, Africans, Asians and even some North Americans)
Friday, 27 June
10.00-10.45: Indycar practice 1
14.00-14.45: Indycar practice 2
14.45-14.55: Indycar standing starts practice
Saturday, 28 June
10.00-11.10: Indycar race 1 qualifying
13.05-13.45: Pro Mazda race 1
14.45: Grand Prix of Houston (1 of 2)
15.00: Colombia (Juan Montoya) vs. Uruguay (Adrian Sutil) (that's 9pm UK time and 10pm in western Europe)
Sunday, 29 June
10.00-10.30: Indycar race 2 petit-qualifying
14.45: Grand Prix of Houston (2 of 2)
15.00: Costa Rica vs. Greece
But who knows? Maybe you're sick of all the football now.
The first and so far only Houston classic
Madness
There's a big helping of open-wheel racing's classical half-bakedness in the concept of racing around the outside of a stadium used to holding events on the inside. The half-bakedness has reached a further level of perfection in Houston, with race fans being allowed inside Reliant Park, which has been rigged up with big TV screens so they can watch the race that's going on all around them. Glorious.
Old and new faces
It's not really worth getting into the championship standings when the doubleheader at Houston is liable to have radically changed the story by Monday morning. What can't be changed is the overall drift of the season, which, Ganassi suckfest aside, has a distinct feeling of 2003-2010 about it. Penske are 1-2-7 in the championship and Andretti are 3-4-6. A CART-style breakaway would be easier to achieve nowadays, since a viable field could be assembled with the agreement of just Roger Penske, Chip Ganassi and Michael Andretti. Haha, good one!
Anyway, here's 2014's edition of Robin Miller's institution, the mid-season report card. You have to scroll to the end to find the Ganassi team, but don't let that stop you. On the same website, which is conveniently the only website that covers Indycar, Marshall Pruett has a rundown of how they've made the track, or rather the spectator areas, safer following Franchitti's accident. The front straight has also been repaved following a request from Robby Gordon, whose Stadium Super Trucks were struggling with the demands it made on suspension travel.
In other exciting news about drivers you won't have heard of unless you follow Flav and Bernie's spare parts cartel cum “F1 feeder series”, GP2 favourite Luca Filippi is semi-returning for another semi-crack at his Indycar semi-career. He was pretty good in Houston last year, qualifying his Herta car eighth in Race 1 and setting fastest lap in Race 2. He's driving for Rahal this weekend.
Speaking of Bobby Rahal, he'll be the grand marshal for the races this weekend. He knows a thing or two about unmitigated disasters, so it'll be good to have him on hand if heat or thunderstorms do turn everything tits-up.
Indycar is trying to work figuratively and literally around this
Public service announcements
* Thanks to Bloomberg's Businessweek magazine, we now know JR Hildebrand's real first name. Although one could be forgiven for thinking the initialatum stood for Journeyman Roadblock, it's in fact John R. Did you know that John R. deferred a place at MIT to concentrate on his racing career? And that he's working with some Californian charter schools to include motor racing in the science engineering mathematics curriculum? “Physics”, he says, channelling Walter White, “is primarily about motion, force and energy. All things we see daily at the race track.” Anyway, balls to the sarcasm, racing in schools is great. Whatever it takes to keep the teachers out of the meth trade.
* MotoGP this weekend is on Saturday. SATURDAY.
* To celebrate Nigeria's impending progress to the second round of the World Cup, the Nigerian Streaming Club is delighted to announce it is consolidating its variety of hidden fees into one easy-to-keep-track-of hidden fee. Payment is non-negotiable and subject to a cost-of-living increase based on a price index for toughs, heavies, baseball bats, sacks of taps, hoodlums, crowbars, cybercriminals and witch doctors. Nigerian Streaming Club accepts/demands payment in cash, credit, stocks, shares, bitcoin and maize.
Edited by Risil, 25 June 2014 - 19:14.
