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

The race has always had long stretches in the middle that are relatively dull and the end is really the only part that matters. I won't argue about Sato being an idiot or that there was plenty of stupidity on display. There's almost always a handful of idiotic decisions by backmarker teams during the 500.

I thought it was a fun race - despite the Penske/Gannassi domination - precisely because there were about six cars that all had a legit chance to win the thing during the day, and in those final 20 laps you had three guys repeatedly swapping the lead. I can't remember a 500 where three cars were all in contention that late. There have been plenty - including the Hornish-Marco race - where two cars were battling it out, and some of those have been the most thrilling the speedway's ever had.

 

Let's not forget that all three of those cars were from the same team.

 

Right, that's right.

The roar that went up when Montoya passed late for the lead was one of the most excited I've heard the place in the two decades I've been going, non-TK category.

 

I was out of town last weekend so I finished watching the race last night (thank you YouTube!). Here are some of my thoughts:
1. Three drivers had the best cars (TK, Dixon and Pagenaud). TK's car faded a bit, leading to the aero change which doomed him. Such a shame. Pagenaud looked to be saving his car for the end, too bad he got the damage late. His charge through the field at the end (I believe he went from 21st to 10th) wasn't mentioned but was impressive. Dixon's car seemed to be at its worst at the end. Or maybe his car was as good as it had been all day and the others simply got better.
2. Montoya and Power seemed to be good enough to hang with the leaders much of the day, but not really compete with them until the last run. That was a ballsy car by Power and his crew to put the car on the ragged edge for that last run, but it was the right move as I'm not sure he would have been able to challenge for the win without those changes.
3. Thank God no one flipped or was seriously injured. Based on the crashes in practice I was extremely nervous, but fortunately nothing bad happened in the race and no cars caught air.
4. I like Sato's aggressiveness, when appropriate. Going three wide on the outside of turn 1 on lap 1, however? That's beyond stupid. I can only imagine Foyt's disgust. Plus young Sage didn't get a chance to back up the strong runs he's had in practice, which was perhaps the biggest bummer of the day.
5. Daly's car caught fire on the parade laps. I noticed he had a "Powered by Bacon" sticker or something similar on his car. Hmmm. Grease drippings?
6. In some ways the race reminded me of 2006: Ganassi dominated the first half (TK/Dixon this year, Wheldon in 2006), with Penske lurking (Hornish in 2006, Pagenaud/Montoya/Power this year). In the end Ganassi's domination faded at the end both times while Penske took the win.
7. Chevy won't have such a big advantage next year. Rahal is (finally) proving he's the real deal, plus the Andretti team has the resources to help develop the Honda package. I think. Could be wrong, though, since Ganassi and Penske won't make it easy.
8. There was an overhead shot at one point showing a huge swath of empty seats in the turn 4 area.
9. It was great seeing Montoya share the moment with his family, letting his children drink the milk and looking around frantically for his wife. Such a different place in life for him now than 15 years ago.
10. I thought ABC did a great job with the pre-race coverage, in particular the piece about the fallen soldier.
11. Kudos to Kimball on his great run. When people think Ganassi, they think of Dixon and TK being the threats, plus Sage this month with his strong runs. But there was Kimball in third.

 

Murphy, I was sitting near Turn 4, and at least one swath of seats weren't even sold - they didn't even have bleachers any more. I just suspected that it was because the view was so bad from there that they rarely sold them, or, we speculated, there were safety reasons.

 

IndyCar is damn lucky Ryan Briscoe wasn't killed today at Fontana. As the race unfolded, I kept having flashbacks to that 2011 Vegas race. That was BS. If I wanted to watch crap like that, I would go back to watching NASCAR plate "racing."
To me, Will Power summed it up perfectly: "What are we doing?"
Hey Circus Clown, here is my double bird salute to you.

 

My favorite post race comment was from Tony Kanaan, quoted in the L.A. Times:

"We can't forget that we lost my best friend in exactly the same way in 2011," Kanaan said, referring to Dan Wheldon, who died at age 33 after a collision during a 2011 IndyCar race in Las Vegas. "I understand what the fans want. If you say we're going to have 100,000 people and this is what we're going to do, I might agree with you that we need to put it out there. To have 5,000 people out there and do this, it's stupid."

 

The thing is, IndyCar has had many pack races over the years which fans supposedly love, yet the series has been struggling with small crowds at ovals not named Indy and Texas pretty much since its inception. IIRC, the first real pack race for IndyCar was Texas in about 2000. For years I've argued IndyCar has the best racing of any major series, yet essentially no one knows about it. But Saturday's race was a ticking time bomb and I don't know if I can stomach watching more crap like that. For years I hated watching plate "races" at Talladega because you knew at some point one driver was going to slip just a bit and the Big One would take out half the field. To me it was artificial made-for-TV racing and that's just what Saturday was. You can't have open-wheel cars going three-, four- and five-wide all day, chopping each other off like crazy without consequences. Briscoe was incredibly lucky his front end dug into the ground like a spear, because otherwise there's a good chance he would have landed on his head.
IndyCar is lucky in another way: the style of racing and crashes overshadowed the complete idiots in race control (cough cough, Barnfart). Rahal chops off Castroneves which causes him to lift off, yet Briscoe gets penalized for the crash that results? Then Rahal leaves the pits with the fuel probe still attached (a boneheaded move by the fueler to put it back in for some reason) and no penalty? WTF?

 

Justin Wilson in a coma and in critical condition after being struck in the head by debris in a collision today.

 

The debris was Sage Karam's nose cone - a pretty heavy piece to hit the head at 140+ mph. I'm amazed he left the track alive, and hope by some miracle he recovers. It doesn't sound good, though.

Pocono is one of the Indy races I try to tune in every year, but a family event kept me from it yesterday. I just looked up the crash video on YouTube, and it's one of those I wish I had not.

 

There were a lot of pretty nasty looking crashes yesterday. I remember as a kid watching the last couple of Pocono IndyCar races in the late 1980s. The track was so bumpy at the time plus it was 500 miles, so it was a race of attrition. Yesterday was a race of attrition as well, because there were so many crashes.
I was a bit surprised and disappointed they restarted the race after Wilson's hit. You could tell it was bad right away because while two workers tended to Karam, truck after truck zoomed by him on the way to Wilson. Guys jumping out of the early trucks were sprinting to Wilson's car. There was obviously more urgency than usual, plus NBCSN (thankfully) didn't zoom in too close or show replays for a while. Such a terrible deal for such a nice guy.
It was a nice gesture for Tony Stewart to send his plane so Wilson's family could get to the hospital.
As far as Rahal's crash, I can understand him being upset. But Tristian was almost totally alongside him and had a big run. If you're running for a title and you see you're the meat of a three-wide deal going into a corner where three cars won't fit, back off. Push the issue at your own risk, which is exactly what Rahal did. That was a type of move Rahal pre-2015 would have made.

 

IndyCar CEO is speaking at IMS in a half-hour. I suspect the news will not be good.