Very Popular Indycar Racing Series endorsed by Team Penske's Juan Montoya
Round 16 of 18
ABC Supply Takuma Sato 250 @ the Milwaukee Mile
Lap length: One mile (and a bit)
Turns: 4, flat as a stack of matzos.
Previous winner: Ryan Hunter-Reay (Andretti/Chevy)
Yes! Let's go round in circles!
Fifteen rounds of mostly-entertaining Indycar racing has led us here. I know the four championship contenders have spent more time screwing around than a Yankee lieutenant at an abandoned Nazi pleasure resort in the last days of World War II, but things is serious now. No more spins. No more speeding in the pits. No more crashes. Especially no more crashes that take seven cars out of the race. Will Power, Helio Castroneves, Ryan Hunter-Reay and Simon Pagenaud have arrived at this beef-infested hellhole for one thing, and one thing only. Victory or possibly finishing seventh while the other three crash or break down or get lapped. That would do.
Where are we and what have you done with the street courses?
This week the cross-continental circus (and, as Murray Walker would say, I use that word advisedly) rocks up in the rolling cattle country of Wisconsin.
Thisconsin?
Nope, not that Consin. We're at the Milwaukee Mile, a track so quintessential of Indycar that there's not a single one like it anywhere in the world. The track's racing history dates back to 1903, although in those days you didn't so much “race” a car as “enlist it in a demonstration of why racing automobiles would be a stupid idea”. It was an auspicious decade for Wisconsin. Coming a whole generation after its invention of beer in the mid 19th century, in the 1900s Wisconsin sent Robert M. La Follette, the greatest American politician of all time, to the US Senate, and gave birth to another senator, the noted film critic Joseph McCarthy. All this and the Milwaukee Mile!
But contrary to what you might've heard, the Milwaukee Mile is not the prototype unit of measure for the American mile.
Glad we've got that cleared up. When are we doing this and what order are we doing it in?
(All times are Milwaukee time, which is to say plus 6 from London time)
Saturday, August 16
10:00-11:00: Indycar practice 1
13:30-14:30: Indycar practice 2
14:45-15:30: Pro Mazda qualifying (yes, we have an actual support programme on an oval)
16:05-16:45: Indy Lights practice (see 16th and Georgetown's newest museum piece while you can)
17:00-18:15: Indycar qualifying
18:30-19:30: Pro Mazda race
Sunday, August 17
12:00-13:00: Indy Lights race
14:00: NBC Sports starts their trademark brand of informative but slightly weird race broadcasting
14:45: ABC Supply 250 GO!
An angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures Indycar. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call Will Power.
I'm a big Indycar fan but I don't know shit
Don't worry you're in some good company. I used to be like you, but then I started writing these OPs and now what I say becomes reality. Here's a round-up of the latest reality from the world of Indycar:
National Guff
Celebrating America's successful extrication from a debilitating war in the Middle East, the US National Guard has pulled out of all motor racing. Its steadfast dedication, its patriotism and most importantly its money will be greatly missed by the Indycar and NASCAR paddocks. It feels safe to say that despite its natural affinity for a sport beloved for its colossal idiocy, jargon-spouting leaders and ability to burn through money unmatched since the Great Dutch Tulip Fire of 1637, the National Guard never found the right marketing fit. John Barnes's lamented Panther outfit was a little too reminiscent of MacArthur at Bataan, suddenly surrounded by the invasion of displaced CARTers. In 2014 Graham Rahal has been doing a weekly Iranian Hostage Crisis show. Dale Junior? The Iraq War -- big, tirelessly promoted and exploiting the memory of Daddy's achievements lots of time and effort wasted on a bad cause unfairly characterized by the European media.
The night old Dixie drove them down
Two weeks ago we saw a grim prospect of the future. Mankind reduced to crawling across an apocalyptic city-less wasteland, scratching around for the few remaining oil reserves to heat their homes in winter and traverse the continental distances between the few remaining settlements. Suddenly, a paleface from across the seas emerges, vanquishing all before him with his ability to get incredible fuel mileage. Before you can say or spell apotheosis, he is hoisted aloft and brought to the Sacred Druidic Circle of Winners. Here he will reign over his tribe for a year and a day before being ceremonially beheaded, starved to death or killed by Will Power in single combat. Yes, Formula One has its turbos, Toyota has its supercapacitors, and Indycar has Scott Dixon.
Support a publishing conglomerate by giving them all your money
Wow! Not content with being your favourite one stop shop for racing tittle-tattle, week-old race reports and colour photography, Autosport magazine is running a special issue dedicated to the four-wheeled wonder that is the (Verizon) Indycar Series! There's a lot of good shit in there about the Mansell-until-Catastrophe era, and it's guest edited by Alex Zanardi. Which, if it's anything like the magazine I used to work for, involves asking him for 600 words of introduction, rewriting it into legible English, and then doing everything else by yourself. If you're a subscriber, you can read Eurosport Hero Jeremy Shaw's memory, right out of his brain.
But you should probably also buy a copy if you can. Frame it. Stuff it. Fit it with a speaker so that when you press a button it flops around and plays the intro to ABC's Wide World of Sports. Because it will never happen again.
Aero kitsch
2012 called and asked whether you were still interested in these fabulous aero body kits. From what I understand of this Indycar.com article, they're going to laser scan the Dallara into iRacing and then run the whole of next season at Lime Rock and South Boston Speedway. Looking forward to it! As the author's anonymous source says, "That’s really cool and will save a lot of time next year."
Tell me about the year 2014
2014? You mean that fabulous Indycar racing year which ended with Will Power being crowned series champion under the palms at St Petersburg? Yes I can tell you about that. Early skirmishes at Mid-Ohio, Toronto and Iowa saw the year's title protagonists Power, Castroneves, Hunter-Reay and Pagenaud virtually equal in championship points. They arrived at Pocono in eager expectation of opening up a gap on their competitors, but three of them left very disappointed having been destroyed by Helio Castroneves, whose double points second place left him with a big points lead.
The celebrations were short-lived, however, as an appalling run of results saw Helio drop back into the clutches of his rivals. They hadn't exactly torn the place up either, despite strong performances at Houston and Detroit from Pagenaud and Power respectively bringing them back into play. Meanwhile, Hunter-Reay was doing his best to make everyone remember his pre-2012 career.
The Month of May signified the seriousness of how things were getting, and a last-lap win from Hunter-Reay transmuted the championship from a Penske stranglehold to one in which all things were possible. With a further second-place at the Indy GP and a crushing, splashing win in Alabama, Hunter-Reay had announced himself as a challenger to Will Power and potential picker-upper of Castroneves's one-victory lead, should anything silly happen. An inspired strategy call from Boss Roger at the Indy GP was the only thing keeping Helio at arm's length from his rivals, who were smelling blood like the great white shark Three Stooges.
Long Beach was crunch time. The penultimate round, Hunter-Reay aimed to do what he needed to close the half-win gap from Power and 53 point deficit to Castroneves. With Hunter-Reay sitting on pole for Sunday afternoon's race and the Penske duo stuck in midpack, the race promised to be one to remember. It was, mostly. But only after a buttermilk-addled Hunter-Reay snatched at the lead on lap 56, taking out himself and, it seemed, half the field. Castroneves was one driver collected by Hunter-Reay's disabled car, but instead of getting out of the car and making Ryan drop faster than Sonny Liston spotting some Nation of Islam heavies, he stuck at it and grabbed a useful 19 points for 11th. Will Power, who earlier had taken out his former championship rival Simon Power, sneaked through the wreckage to finish second. 13 points behind Helio. It would be a Penske championship after all.
With Castroneves looking strong, Power would need every point he could get. He missed pole, but after running with Sato early on, he blasted past the Tokyo Troublemaker and went about an unusual error-free domination of the race. With 3 lap-leading points in the bag on top of the 10 points he'd pull out over second place, forget Helio, the championship was his. Kimball in the wall. Caution. Worse still – Castroneves on his gearbox. On the restart, Power examined his conscience for precisely one millisecond and brake-checked his teammate. As Will roared away, Castroneves found himself under attack from Hunter-Reay, who would for a second time in two races prove his executioner. Second place was gone, and any chance of passing Power.
As the NBC-broadcast-window-friendly championship celebrations began, Castroneves retreated to his plantation in the Carolinas and plotted revenge. Will Power gave a strange victory speech in which he implied that he'd won the three previous championships and sold his parents as bushmeat to pay for his first Formula Holden ride. Meanwhile, we all wondered what would've happened if we'd ever found out the results of the year's opening three races at Fontana, Sonoma and Milwaukee. Of all the calamities visited on planet Earth by the Great Blindness of 2014 (now thought to have been caused by a meteor shower, or possibly parasite-infested tenderloin), this was perhaps a minor one. But as with the European Driver's Championship of 1939, or the time Andrew Hope went missing from the last forum meet-up before reappearing at 5am with his face smeared with Kraft Dinner and the warm blood of a goat, we will never know what really happened.
Edited by Risil, 14 August 2014 - 12:16.