Author: Pat W

UOWWB Questions

I’ve been remiss on not answering the United Open Wheel Word Butcher questions of the last couple of weeks and there’s another one up today, so let’s run through some quickie answers:

Many IRL drivers from last season have not been officially signed to a deal for 2009. This includes Ryan Hunter-Reay, Oriol Servia, Justin Wilson, Darren Manning, Buddy Rice, AJ Foyt IV, Bruno Junqueira, Enrique Bernoldi, Jaime Camara, Milka Duno, Townsend Bell, Mario Dominguez, and a few others. How many of these drivers will be driving in the IRL this season?

This question was posted on Feb 9th and obviously we now know the fates of Wilson, Duno and hopefully Junky (I think he’ll get the other Coyne car). I think Camara is in with Conquest again, he’s listed to test with them tomorrow but I don’t know if he’s confirmed.
I don’t see many of these others getting drives without funding. I’m pretty sure Manning is in sportscars, RHR and Servia definitely need to be in the series but I don’t see anything rumoured on the other blogs/sites. So we’re getting some good guys back, some are sitting out who shouldn’t be sitting out, and others… I don’t really care about!

If you were given one wish and could change anything about auto racing, what would you’re one wish be?

Two words: Economic Recovery!!
At this point all the stuff we’d usually discuss about drivers, teams, tracks, events, sponsors, etc – these things are just niceties right now. We just need to survive. It’s that bad. So essentially what I’d change is the attitudes in some parts of racing right now who seem to have their heads in the sand, thinking this is just going to go away by itself.

“Of the unemployed drivers in the Indycar Series (see below) which two would you employ to join your racing team”
* Ryan Hunter-Reay
* Oriol Servia
* Justin Wilson
* Darren Manning
* Buddy Rice
* AJ Foyt IV
* Bruno Junqueira
* Enrique Bernoldi
* Jaime Camara
* Townsend Bell
* Mario Dominguez
* Jay Howard
* Alex Lloyd
* Tomas Scheckter

We can strike Wilson and Camara as taken for Coyne and Conquest, I don’t think they are 100% official yet but they are almost there.

So to answer the question: I’ll take Ryan Hunter-Reay and Darren Manning, please. Servia is a close call but Manning nicks it for patriotic and personality/PR reasons – and I’ll take RHR any day, he’s the business.

* * *
Interesting day tomorrow, we’ve got announcements from the BBC F1 team on what they have planned, we’ll have something from Peter Windsor’s USF1 operation, and perhaps something will come from the former Honda F1 team as I believe their Mercedes engine option timed out today. While all this happens the IndyCars will have their first test of the year, at the Homestead oval, which will be about as useful as any test of any car in terms of form guides but it’ll give us something to talk about.

I’ll do a round-up at this time tomorrow, if some of that hasn’t happened yet then tough!

In the meantime if you’re on Twitter you should add these:
LeeMcK (Lee McKenzie, BBC’s F1 pit reporter for 2009)
BMWSauberF1Team
Vision Racing
HVM Racing

Tell me if you know any more!

On The Limit

I’ve been toying with the idea of an occasional series spotlighting videos of onboard laps, perhaps one a week, perhaps featuring an upcoming racetrack or someone in the news at the moment – and generally enjoy drivers pushing at the limit of their ability.

I’ve just seen a video which has prompted me to start the series a few days early. Head over to http://www.nofenders.net/ and check out the vid of Robert Doornbos in the 2007 CCWS Assen event.

I plan to use this feature in lieu of writing my own ‘track guide’ before F1 or IRL events, for I am lazy and this is the easy route.

Weekend Preview: 21-22 February 2009

It’s all about A1 and NASCAR this weekend, and in the UK both of these will air live on Sky Sports 2.

A1GP World Cup
– Gauteng (5/?)
– Kyalami
– South Africa
– Website: www.a1gp.com

The World Cup of Motorsport pays its first visit to Kyalami, although for some reason A1GP calls it Gauteng. South African rounds were previously held on a street track by the beach in Durban which was far too narrow, there were always silly little crashes at the hairpin first turn, but despite that it was still entertaining! Let’s see how the newer bigger cars get on at the former home of the South African Grand Prix.
(I put a question mark in the # of rounds section above, ‘cos really, who knows?)

British air time: Sunday 11:30am GMT, Sky Sports 2
Elsewhere: check listings or use a1gp.com

NASCAR Sprint Cup
– Auto Club 500 (2/36)
– Auto Club Speedway (which is really California Speedway)
– Fontana, California, United States
– www.nascar.com

I’m not sure why, but NASCAR thought it would be idea to make the teams drive from Florida to California in a few days between a couple of 500 mile races. Good plan, NASCAR, nothing like tiring out your teams at the very beginning of a 36 race season. Tune in to see how the boys cope. It’ll be late here and I’ll be sleeping.

British air time: 11pm GMT, Sky Sports 2
American air time: 5pm EST, FOX

Support races at Fontana include:

Saturday:
NASCAR Nationwide Series
– Stater Bros 300

:shrug: I know nothing.

British air time: Not found.
American air time: Saturday 7pm EST, ESPN2

NASCAR Camping World Truck Series
– San Bernadino County 200

Is that a local county? If they are sponsoring it, times must be tight..

British air time: Not found.
American air time: Saturday 3pm, FOX

Seems the 3rd tier event gets to run on Fox while the 2nd tier doesn’t, not sure of the logic but there you go.

* * *

This is all very interesting but probably the most interesting events of the next seven days happens on Tuesday where we will have two important announcements:

1) USF1 making an announcement on SPEED.
2) BBC announcing full details of their F1 coverage, I’m looking forward to that more than the USF1!

Okay, have a great weekend.

A roof over your head

So.. I watched the Daytona 500 last night. You may have seen my Twitter feed at the time (see side panel) and my comments on Meesh’s recent post.

I think some of those experienced NASCAR fans following me on Twitter might have been getting a bit annoyed at my newbie-ness. I was going for the ‘F1/IRL fan discovers N-Word ovals’ take, because that’s what it was. I’m not going to apologise for that, I make it clear that I’m not a NASCAR fan, so if I annoyed you that’s your own fault for following me! (Yes, I am a bit of a racing snob.)

Someone even asked how long I’d been following racing so surprised were they at my reaction to the US feed I was watching. It was tongue-in-cheek (err, I think?) but perhaps not realising that British sports coverage doesn’t have sponsored discussion topics and anthropomorphic camera angles – or maybe it was to suggest I’m a noob for not being aware of the $$ in N-Word. Perhaps it was said not knowing I was British although I’m not sure why – I bang on about it far too often.

I just couldn’t believe how many ad breaks were taken, and during the coverage how many times a sponsor was mentioned. They couldn’t go more than 20 seconds without mentioning a brand name! It was ridiculous. Talk about over-commercialisation of sports.. and they say the Premier League has got it bad.

Just to rub it in to my American readers, our Formula 1 coverage switches to BBC1 this year – no commercials AT ALL! (apart from lots of BBC self-promotion)

Back to Daytona, and once I found a steady video feed quite late into the race I did actually enjoy it. I’m not stupid enough to expect real racing on a restrictor plate track, you need to look for strategy and leave the driving to another race. Some great strategic racing was developing before a yellow flag was thrown because a car was sent into the infield. I didn’t see much debris on the track on this occasion, but that yellow did breed further yellows (for bigger incidents) which spoiled the flow of the race for me, and that persisted until the red flag for rain. As many sites and blogs have noted, it was an anticlimax.

I don’t know why I persisted with the less-good feed for so long. I think it contributed to my lack of enjoyment for the first half of the event, however others have noted on other blogs (and on Twitter) that NASCAR races aren’t actually that interesting or enjoyable until 50 to go anyway, so maybe it wasn’t the video feed…

In summary, it was more enjoyable as a whole than I was expecting and you can’t blame them for stopping for rain. If anything the stupid start time did them in. 3.30pm? Madness. Races should always start on the hour unless they are on the undercard. I’ll be trying NASCAR ovals at random intervals again this year, follow my Twitter if you can bear it.

Full disclosure: On Twitter I said I’d not seen a full NASCAR race before. That was a little white lie. I’ve watched Watkins Glen, and I watched a chunk of Nationwide at Montreal last year. I had never seen a full NASCAR oval event before. I used to watch the odd highlights package – they cut so much out you couldn’t figure out what was happening so I gave up on that idea fairly quickly.

Before the oval action I took in BTCC at Brands Hatch (Indy) and DTM at Barcelona, both recordings of events held in September, and still found time to go to the laundrette.
The DTM was boring once it had settled down, the field got far too spread out although I liked the battle between Paul Di Resta and Timo Scheider early on.
The BTCC at the short layout of Brands is always fast and frenetic and this was no exception! It won the day for me in terms of tin top entertainment. Giovanardi is a worthy champion and it is a shame to see his adversaries SEAT leave.

Tonight I’m watching WTCC at Imola, the first time I’ve seen the place since the redevelopment. They’ve done a great job with the revisions but F1 was right not to go back, even though the revisions were only done to please Bernie. It’s a good bike and touring car track but is in no way suited to big open wheel cars. WTCC isn’t as entertaining as BTCC but watching Thommo working hard for some good results was fun.

After this sudden binge of racing I’ll probably take a break from watching any for a few days – I still have plenty on my hard drive – BTC and WTC have short races which is why I’ve got through so many this weekend. Knowing me I’ll probably be on the podcasts tomorrow instead!