"In IndyCar, no one makes money. It's just great, pure racing."
-- Sebastien Bourdais, or Afterburner, I don't know anymore
Verizon Indycar Series Round 9 of 16: Rain-free Super-fast Firestone Whatever 600, Fort Worth, TX
248 laps, 24 degrees of banking, four-ish turns and none of that bourgeois daylight to ruin things. Indycar's ramblin' gamblin' hole-in-the-wall gang of rampaging thirtysomethings is rolling into town. Are floodlights, high-speed tyre saving and Ed Carpenter your thing? Do you like Saturday? Are you hoping to watch a race like one you sort of remember from 2012 and not the ones you definitely don't remember from 2013 and 2014? Are you the kind of person who posts your observations on internet forums having plagiarized them directly from Scott Goodyear? You sick bastard.
We're a broad church here and judgement is reserved for God alone. So please stop by and loosen the strings of your brain-purse on this thread, spanning the first stop of Indycar's overseas leg in Texas and Toronto. Would ye know yet more?
Remember this? He didn't win.
Whats and whens
These are Texas time. Add 6 if you're in the UK.
Thursday, June 4
Thursday is trucks day. It does not concern you. Does it?
Friday, June 5
11.00-12.15: Indycar practice 1
15.15-16.15: Indycar qualifying (already! I know!)
18.45-19.15: This is all you're getting that even approaches night-time Indycar practice
20.00: Truck racing! Move along please.
Saturday, June 6
SATURDAY IS RACE DAY.
17.30: "Pre-race concert featuring Reckless Kelly"
17.45: "Gee, Reckless Kelly is the best acid bluegrass fiddle trio I've ever heard!"
19.20: If we're lucky, we'll find out what aero spec they're running around now
19.30: 248 laps of racing! Green flag!
Brought to you by Chaos and Old Night
A turn for the Wirth
What do you remember from the last week-and-a-half? Rain? Pace cars? Something about Juan Montoya? I can't remember much. If we're being honest, I'm suffering from the kind of race fatigue that can only be remedied by a sensible two-or-three week gap in the schedule to take stock and replenish my enthusiasm.
Well screw that. Like a shuttlebus of dog executives returning to a vomit conference, we're plunging straight back into Indycar to see if we can extract some order, or at any rate sustenance, from this steaming pile of entropy.
Unpredictable weather running the full gamut from warm and rainy to cold and rainy saw a race that many outlets, including the Heseltine Mothership, described as "wild". If the weekend had been any "wilder" it would've hopped back into the Detroit River and made for the open sea. Every driver you've ever heard of seemed to crash, or get on the wrong tyres and then crash, or get on the right tyres and crash, or punt the champion into his teammate and then drive on to finish fourth in their first road race for over a year as the points leader ran out of fuel. And then two green cars won the races. To put that into perspective, a car painted green hasn't won in Formula One for two decades, and even then it had to run with an illegal fuel rig.
I sometimes think that racing fans -- the obsessive kind, anyway -- are like auditors, possibly at the accountancy firm in hell. Punctiliously following the ins and outs, formbooks and strategies, in order to put a rubber stamp on the final result as accurately reflecting the thereins. If the Belle Isle weekend had been a set of accounts, you'd expect to see the name "Sepp Blatter" signed at the bottom. The Computational Fluid Debacle that is Honda dominated. Sato scored his first podium in over two years. DRACONE, well, he didn't show up.
Championship leader and halfway-point overwhelming favourite Juan Montoya had a disaster of a weekend, with two tenth places. In the kind of stroke of luck that tends to befall overwhelming favourites, his rivals either did worse or not noticeably better.
Belle of Belle Isle Mini Championship
Montoya: 43 pts
Power: 47 pts
Dixon: 41 pts
Rahal: 42 pts
Castroneves: 39 pts
If you're interested, Belle of Belle Isle was, with a 2nd and a 5th, Marco Andretti. And may God forgive us.
Sebastien Bourdais (also pictured far left, caution number 800)
8 to go
May God also forgive me for mentioning the points table. The season is half done, and with the double points finale at Sonoma balancing out the double points Indy 500, the points table is half filled-in too. Coming off the last few seasons it's strange to say we actually have a halfway favourite, and not the usual state of affairs with 108 suitors and no Ulysses. As you might have guessed if you'd considered the 1999 and 2000 seasons and then not overthought things, it's Juan Montoya. Will Power and Scott Dixon are within a win and a win-and-a-half of Juan respectively, and perma-flash-in-the-pan Graham Rahal is, er, flashing at their heels.
Preseason hot tip Simon Pagenaud is stealthily hanging back in ninth, perhaps wondering where it all went. Ryan Briscoe, a former Penske driver who It did get away from, is temporarily back in, subbing for James Hinchcliffe at Schmidt Peterson. Which, Honda aero aside, is a decent ride. Motor racing can be cruel but also insanely generous, like the Millionaire in City Lights. You miss your one shot, then after a decade the target comes around again and you're driving a Penske in the Indy 500. Repeat.
Edited by Risil, 02 June 2015 - 23:32.
