The 2024 running motorsports thread

The F1 script apparently got lost on the way from Hollywood to Miami. That was unexpected.

 

Kyle Larson just won Kansas 1 by less than the width of his splitter.

Official margin of victory was 0.001 seconds.

 

And then that finish. Good Lord.

 

I think that's the first time, even with all of these super close finishes, that I've seen them flip-flop on the initial call.

SIx inches, maybe? Larson was lucky he was in the lane with that little bit of extra paint in front of the finish line.

 

The F1 race in Miami was pretty good. I'm glad somebody besides Max and Red Bull won.

 

Massive quibble about NASCAR's "closest Cup finish in history!"

It's the closest finish since the introduction of the electric scoring loops and transponders. However, NASCAR ran thousands of races before that technology existed, including the 1959 Daytona 500 photo finish, which could or could not have been closer than .001, because we just don't know based on a grainy photograph taken from the infield.

I'm going to say it's probably 99 percent correct that last night's race was historical, but I'd rather them be upfront and honest. But NASCAR treats anything that happened before 1980 as prehistoric, so I'm not surprised.

And I trust NASCAR to be forthright about that as far as I can throw their 90 million avid fans, a claim that was so ludicrous at the time that we refused to post it on the official website.

That's like the Statcast Era in baseball. Professional major league baseball played 140 seasons before the technology to accurately track things like exit velocity and launch angle was invented.

Reggie Jackson's light tower shot at Tiger Stadium in the 1971 All-Star Game is the hardest-hit ball I've ever seen but there's no way to accurately determine exit velocity, so I'm more than happy to see "in the Statcast Era" when reading stories.

 

It's just like I personally draw a distinction between championships and chase titles.
Not. The. Same. Thing.
I have, nor ever will have, either, but it's a hill I die on in barstool conversations.

 

Today on "Awkward play-by-play moments," we have MRN's call of the final lap at Kansas. They hit the finish at the 1:00 mark.

 

I heard that the other night and it was bad. I don’t care what the pylon says, you wait for official word to come from race control.

 

Penske suspends Cindric and 3 others in the wake of a cheating scandal ahead of the Indianapolis 500

 

The MRN crew is not what it was in the days of Barney Hall.