All-purpose open-wheel (F1, IRL) racing thread

Caught the last 30 or so laps. I hope the racing was better earlier in the race, or that TV didn't do it justice.
Agreed on the Dixon penalty. They showed the replay at the end and I thought Dixon handled it pretty well. And seeing him blow off Bruce Martin (professional looking as always) was hilarious.

 

Nelson Piquet Jr. managed to win a Nationwide Series race.

 

Iowa was worth staying up late for -- pretty compelling, lots of wheel-to-wheel driving without the pack racing (e.g., we actually saw passes). Ryan Hunter-Reay wins 2nd straight with a nice pass of Dixon in the final 15 laps.

Pretty entertaining: Franchitti blows an engine on the parade lap, Will Power wipes out EJ Viso, gets the predictable verbal slapping from EJ (Dario Franchitti, on the TV broadcast: "That's pretty rich coming from Viso. He's hit everything but the pace car"), Justin Wilson does an incredible piece of driving to avoid a wiping-out James Hinchcliffe. Looked like the cars were hard to hold onto.

Only real bummer about the finish was Katherine Legge hitting the wall with 3 laps left, denying Marco Andretti a shot of catching RHR (I'm not sure he'd have caught him -- he was about 1.2 behind -- but it would've been interesting to see). Kanaan with a solid drive, Simon Pagenaud finishes top 5 after starting last.

 

Marco acted like a little bitch in the post-race. Sun rises in east, etc.

 

Fernando Alonso rules. From 11th to the win on a street course? I bow in his general direction.

And F1 is having a super-special year if freaking VALENCIA produces a compelling race.

 

Great race.

Hamilton definitely shouldn't have tried to hold off Maldonado with his tires being as bad as they were.

Also, Alonso has now scored 100 points more than Felipe Massa.

 

Massa is God awful and needs to be fired immediately. Bring back Luca Badoer!

 

Fantastic drive from Alonso. And completely agree -- it's a magical year if Valencia is watchable.

After Xabi Alonso's two goals the Spain-France match yesterday, Will Buxton tweeted "And Alonso secures the win. Only time I'll be saying that this weekend."

Feel awful for Grosjean, who had a shot at a win if his alternator didn't crap out.

Hamilton is his own worst enemy. Can't believe how many points he's thrown away over the past few years.

(Agreed on Iowa too -- first oval I've watched start to finish in ages.)

 

To his grave, Hamilton will never learn how to take care of tires. I wouldn't be surprised if his hearse flat-spotted its tires on the way to the cemetary. The accident was Maldonado's fault, but he was in the position to begin with because his tire skills are non-existent.

His Keystone Kop McLaren pit crew didn't help his cause either, putting him back in the field again.

 

He was a little bitch the whole weekend — for that matter, he was that way at the test session the week before. Other than that, I really like the IndyCar drivers. They've been good to deal with every year I've covered them at Iowa.

 

He's been that way for years. Two quick examples: I had a one-on-one with him in 2008. He never went more than a minute without texting on one of his two cell phones. The other example, also from that year: at Iowa Speedway, a fan was walking down pit road trying to get Marco to get autograph his hat. Not during practice, but between sessions. The fan was practically having run to keep up. Before escaping to the garage, Marco suddenly stopped, swung around, grabbed the fan's hat, signed it with a pissed look on his face, turned back around and stormed off.

 

So what did the IndyCar fans think about the format of Iowa? I liked the idea but agreed with Dario that there needs to be some tweaks to the format. Give a financial incentive for winning the heat race (and maybe a bonus point) and split the cars into evenly-divided heats instead of putting all the fast cars in the last heat.