Weekend Preview: 7th & 8th February 2009
A quiet weekend this one, with one single solitary event in all of world motorsports and that’s a preseason non-championship NASCAR event. FORIX lists ‘indoor trials bikes’ which they’ve never had before, but I’m not counting that because I care even less about that than the roundy-round taxis. They don’t show the NASCAR presumably because it isn’t a championship event.
NASCAR [website]
Budweiser Shootout (non-championship)
Daytona International Speedway
Daytona, Florida, United States
I don’t think this falls under the Sprint Cup moniker, since it isn’t a championship event and thus doesn’t count toward Cup points. Anyway, there is apparently a lot of fuss in N-World because the format of the race has changed. Until now it was made up of last season’s pole winners plus past winners of the Shootout, but this year in a blatant attempt to keep the carmakers happy it will be based on the top six owner points for each manufacturer, plus a few wildcards. Hmm.. there goes another incentive to do well this year.
The Shootout is stupid anyway, it is just a high profile drafting test session with prize money, right? Do they other guys get at least a real test to make up for it? I doubt it. I guess they at least announce the competition yellow in advance, so that’s something.
This event will be aired live on Sky Sports Xtra at 1am Saturday night (or Sunday morning for the pedantic) – 
but don’t worry, there are three repeats on Sky Sports 3 and Xtra during Sunday, you lucky beggars. Those repeats are: 11am (SS3), 2.30pm (SS3) and 6pm (SSX).
In the US it will air live on FOX at 8pm ET. I don’t know about HD in the US, it isn’t in HD here.
Next week is more interesting with the Daytona 500 and support races, as well as GP2 Asia and World Rally.
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Notes
Most of my small handful of readers reside in North America, so I’ll try to include US air times when I can. Most of the time I expect they’ll also apply to Canada. I will of course focus on the British broadcast times first and foremost, many of which will also apply to much of the rest of Europe.
I think the Red Bull F1 launch is on Monday so that’ll be interesting to see, and it looks like Bourdais will get the Toro Rosso seat.
I Watch Too Much Racing 
LOL! Here’s a fab site and tool for you: http://www.timeanddate.comI have my account set up there with all the various time zones across N.America and select European cites. So all I do is plug in a time and date and it automatically converts for all of the other time zones. Very helpful when you’re trying to be helpful with broadcast times.
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Thanks, I’ll have a play around with that later! It’ll also help me with live timing of qualifying etc.Unfortunately TV coverage times don’t always tie in with when the event actually happens, so I can’t always add or deduct 5 hours to convert Eastern to UK and vice versa.i.e. Sky Sports on a NASCAR/IRL clashing weekend (where even here you can guess which one gets the tape delay..), or some of the F1 races on US network TV.US series have their domestic TV start times in a handy place on the website front page, and I already have UK channels featuring motorsport programmed into my RadioTimes.com guide.IRL and CART both carried a separate International listings page which was helpful, and F1.com converts to your local timezone with a single click. I queried the concept of “International TV” in the search box at Nascar.com and it didn’t want to know. Neither did it recognise “Sky Sports” so clearly they haven’t announced it, but it’s in Sky’s schedule.
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Regarding the Shootout, it is just nonsense, really, but it’s a fairly entertaining race as far as people not concerned with points, etc.I suspect that the change to the top guys from each mfg was specifically to help each team to counter the now mandated lack of testing. I can’t help wondering if France and Helton have also quietly mandated that the testing info gained be shared with those teams which are not in the shootout. If not, yet another widening of the gap is likely, though one “test” under race conditions shouldn’t make too much difference. It just gives these teams a jump on things…
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