Category: Too Much Racing

Weekend Preview: 14-15 February 2009

After a short quiet period following the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona, racing gets under way again this weekend and at the same venue, this time for the Daytona 500. This weekend truly marks the beginning of months of uninterrupted competition throughout 2009 – I can’t see a completely clear weekend again for months – three cheers for racing!

* * * * Main Event

NASCAR Sprint Cup
– Daytona 500 (1/36)
– Daytona International Speedway
– Daytona, Florida, United States
– www.nascar.com

When we reach the weekend of the Daytona 500 we know the racing season is well and truly upon us. There have been a lot of changes in what is a very short off-season relative to other series, with mergers, driver deals and sponsor changes aplenty. I’m not going to insult you by fumbling my way around this because I know very little about NASCAR, although I am tempted to watch the 500 out of curiosity.

I’ve watched NASCAR before but never a full race. The UK network Five airs a short highlights show of about an hour, in the depths of the night midweek. I got hold of some of those shows last year and it was interesting to watch – for that length of time. I don’t think I can last three or four hours of droning around in packs waiting for big accidents to happen, which is why I’d prefer to try a full NASCAR race at a non-restrictor track. Perhaps some of you NASCAR fans could recommend an event to watch, and remind me nearer the time.

The event is actually already under way, with the Gatorade Duels already having been completed earlier this evening. I’m not entirely sure what they achieved because they’ve already had qualifying and the quali process at Daytona is mega-weird.

The Daytona 500 will air live on Sky Sports 2 and in Hi-Def on Sky Sports HD2. Coverage begins at 8pm Sunday. I should note that in 2008 Daytona was in HD and the rest of the year was SD only, there is no word yet on whether that will be repeated this year.

American coverage is on FOX at 3.30pm ET. So that’s half an hour LESS pre-race build-up than we get here.. hmm. Walk through this with me will-ya? Say it’s 3pm in Florida. Add 5 hours to get British time. 3 + 5 = 8pm Am I missing something here? Maybe they are doing that strange American thing of having the race build-up on a completely different channel beforehand, and I missed the listing.

Support races:

Saturday:
NASCAR Nationwide Series
– Camping World 300

The Nationwide Series gets under way on Saturday afternoon local time.

American air time: 1pm ET, ESPN2
British air time: Not found. This race used to be on the North American Sports Network (NASN), which changed to ESPN America over the winter and they don’t seem to be covering it this time. I’m hunting around forums as I pull this post together and nobody else can find coverage either.

Friday:
NASCAR Camping World Truck Series
– NextEra Energy Resources 250

The trucks-that-aren’t-trucks-but-are-really-pickups kick off the proper racing this weekend, as opposed to the ‘racing to qualify’.

American air time: 8pm ET, SPEED
British air time: Not found.

* * * * Other Events

FIA World Rally Championship
– Rally Norway (2/12)
– Hamar, Norway
– Website: www.wrc.com
– Twitter: @OfficialWRC
– Video: YouTube and Joost

Every other racing series may only just be waking up, and some are several weeks off yet, but WRC is already on to it’s second event of the year as they head north to Norway. It looks like they’ve had some heavy snowfall and the drivers are very happy to have a ‘proper’ snow rally for once. The last few years have seen very little snow on what are supposed to be full winter rallies and the guys can’t wait to get stuck in, metaphorically speaking.

The Production WRC entrants are also competing on this event.

I should mention that WRC’s commerical rights are controlled by David Richards (yes, that one) and it looks like his team is doing a good job of embracing new media! Ironically one of the broadcast partners is a channel called ‘Dave’ (so-named because everyone has a friend called Dave).

There are daily updates on Eurosport from Friday to Sunday, and an event roundup on Dave on Sunday at 6pm.

GP2 Asia Series
– Qatar (4/6)
– Losail International Circuit
– Doha, Qatar, UAE
– Website: www.gp2series.com

The GP2 Asia boys head over to Qatar for more fun in the desert. Yet more driver changes mean this series isn’t really being taken as seriously as the main GP2 Series, though it does serve as a performance indicator for the coming year and a lot of guys are getting some good practice in. The extra track time is certainly helping some of them.

The event is supported once again by the Speedcar Series which is holding a night race.

NOTE – as with all Middle Eastern GP2 Asia events the Feature race is on Friday and the Sprint is on Saturday.

Coverage is on Eurosport at 10.30am on Saturday, I believe this is the live sprint race – it may also have some footage from the feature race because there doesn’t seem to be anything at all on Friday.
There appears to be absolutely no coverage at all of Speedcar (there may be something in locally).

Okay that’s it. I’ve decided I will not be posting all the little logos and icons when the main season gets under way, it takes too long!

Next week: A1GP and more NASCAR.

Weekend Preview: 7 & 8 February 2009

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.

**
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.

Weekend Preview: 31 Jan & 1 Feb

Weekend Preview: 31st January & 1st February 2009

After last week’s excitement at Daytona we have a couple of quiet weeks again, with my listings only showing two events happening at all this weekend and absolutely nothing next weekend. Time for everyone to get their houses in order before the racing madness kicks off again in earnest.

I was actually thinking of setting up a Google Calendar showing all of these events, but actually I’d be better off giving you the link to one of the sources of info for this series of posts.

FORIX Race Calendar < < < Bookmark this page!

Red dots show events upcoming, green dots are past events and are clickable! The list of series expands as the year progresses so don’t worry if it looks small now.

FORIX (main page) is a colossal motorsport database which aims to record the result of any race anywhere. It started out as a Formula 1 resource in the early 90s, until they eventually filled in the gaps in F1 history and started adding other series. Now they cover all sorts of things. I’m not saying their coverage of other series is as comprehensive as their F1 coverage, it’s getting there though.
These days the site is hosted by Autosport.com (hence the banners and domain) but as far as I know it is still free. I have a sub to Autosport so it’s free for me anyway!

You might think giving the link defeats the object of these posts but I disagree – these posts are to flesh out those single-line entries and hopefully provide a bit of background and context.

On to the listings:

World Rally Championship [website]
Rally Ireland
Round 1 of 12
Rally HQ: Sligo, Ireland

The first round of this year’s WRC gets under way with the cross-border event on the Emerald Isle. I don’t know if this is the only rally in the world held in two countries, in this case Ireland and the UK, as the cars will cross the border into Northern Ireland. For that reason alone this event should be supported by everybody – it’s nice to see that kind of positivity.
For the WRC, the loss of the Monte Carlo Rally to the IRC is a bitter blow but one they put upon themselves. WRC is going through a turbulent time at the moment with crazy rules and crazy schedules. If you are able you should watch this year anyway as it may be the last we’ll see of the current-spec World Rally Cars before IRC-style Super2000 comes in, and let’s face it these guys throwing cars at the scenery (and missing) is still pretty spectacular stuff.

Trophee Andros
Clermont/Superbesse, France
Round 7 of 7

The final round of the sideways ice racing series. Take a look!:

Okay I’m out of here, maybe for a few days, maybe not…

Weekend Preview: 24-25 January 2009

Weekend Preview: 24 & 25 January 2009

Welcome to the first proper weekend of racing in 2009!


Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series [website]
Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona [website]
Round 1 of 12
Daytona International Speedway, Daytona Beach, Florida, USA
A field of 52 cars and a huge cast of drivers take to the ‘roval’ (horrible word) course at Daytona for the annual sportscar classic. Will Ganassi triumph again, will arch rivals Penske’s entry spoil their party, or will it be a team ‘native’ to Grand-Am rather than one of America’s big racing powerhouses?
It gets under way at 3.30pm local time, 8.30pm UK. Coverage is live in the US on Speed (with the start on Fox). It looks like you guys get lots of hours of coverage. Here in Europe we’ll get 5 hours live on Eurosport 2 with a highlights show some time later. Note these are not a continuous five hours, and we don’t get the start. We should get from 9.30-11pm Saturday, then 6.30-7pm and 8-9pm on Sunday. I say ‘we’, I don’t actually have Eurosport 1 or 2…

A1GP [website]
4 of 10 (or thereabouts)
Taupo, New Zealand
The World Cup of Motorsport arrives down under. Marco Andretti, Robert Doornbos and Dan Clarke do battle with A1 regulars Adam Carroll and Neel Jani in the new Ferrari cars. The race is live on Sky Sports 1 at 00.30 on Sunday morning (okay, Saturday night). There are replays throughout the day on Sunday on both Sky Sports 1 and 2, the same is true for qualifying.

GP2 Asia Series [website]
3 of 6
Bahrain International Circuit, Sakhir, Bahrain
The revolving cast of drivers arrives in Bahrain for what should be an entertaining couple of races, not that anybody will see them. Bahrain attracts zero spectators. This one is for schmoozing the sponsors. These races are on Eurosport. They were due to be delayed but because women’s skiiing got cancelled, should actually be live. Note these races are on Friday and Saturday.

Speedcar Series [website]
2 of 6
Bahrain International Circuit, Sakhir, Bahrain
Speedcar returns on the double-bill with GP2 Asia as part of the ‘Grand Weekend’ which I think is a translation error.. I don’t believe live coverage exists outside of Asia but I could be wrong.

Intercontinental Rally Challenge [website]
Monte Carlo Rally
1 of 12
Valence, France; Monaco
This former World Championship rally switches to the IRC this year and has actually got under way already, the organisers taking the opportunity to extend the rally away from the constraints of the WRC.
There is coverage on Eurosport – some of it live – because the network part-owns the series! I believe live coverage is on Friday evening.

Andros Trophy [website]
6 of 7
Serre Chevalier, France
The penultimate round of the French ice racing series.

***
I’d planned to put logos up for most of these but ran out of time.

Before you complain, yeah I know I’ve not done the BMW F1 launch post yet. I’m getting around to it. Tomorrow. Promise.