Texas gets a double shot this week – some stockers and some open wheel rocketry.
The NASCAR CampingWorld Truck Series is already in town and practicing for a Friday night shoot ‘em up, Texas style. They tell me it’s already 104 degrees in Texas.
Drive with the windows down, guys! (Not the nets, of course.)
Then, IndyCar, fresh off a sweltering but terrific Indy 500 blows in like a hot Texas wind on Saturday evening. The sun goes down, the lights come on, and those little cars look like bullets on that big, fast track!
Random clips from my first IndyCar race in person. The command to start engines, pace laps, the START!!!, cars flying past my seat at 200+ MPH, pit stops, and the winner Helio. And yes that is Shaq at the beginning!
As the northern swing marks the beginning of NASCAR’s summer season, it also signals a switch in broadcast duties from the venerable FOX to up and coming TNT.
It wouldn’t be right to let such a notable event go by. So the folks at TNT signed up a bunch of geezers and put together a lot of wrecks to remind the naysayers why we rubes watch NASCAR. It’s the wrecks stupid!
um, Not. But thanks for reinforcing the stereotype with AC/DC’s NASCAR commercial:
The Sprint Cup series heads for the mountains and an iffy Pocono weather forecast. Should at least be a little cooler than Charlotte, and maybe a nice way to kick off the summer.
As the show rolls into town, let’s catch up on the grassroots media for Pocono race week.
YouTube Videos for Pocono NASCAR Race Week
Thanks and credit to original posters
Really? Mikey Waltrip in Robby Gordon’s car? I must be behind the times. I thought Mikey was a “piece of #$^%” in Robby’s opinion. Sarcasm, perhaps. Irony?
(Just a quick note: Michael Waltrip will be in Robby Gordon’s car for practice AND qualifying because Robby will be in the Baja 500.) This is your entry list for the Gillette Fusion ProGlide 500 at Pocono. These 45 drivers will attempt to qualify for…
As the IndyCar series races out of a successful Indy 500 and straight into the heart of (North) Texas, many questions surround the drivers and teams.
Has Dario laid the groundwork for a second championship?
Did we learn that Tony Kanaan has the heart of a lion?
Who will Danica blame when the car is imperfect this week?
But in Texas, especially for these late spring/early summer races, it’s all about one thing: the weather. It’s going to be hot. It’s going to be windy. It’s likely to be steamy.
That should make for grinding, stressful racing on one of the fastest open wheel tracks in the world.
NASCAR Nationwide Series Nashville 300 Nashville Superspeedway LeBannon, Tennessee April 3, 2010
In Denton, TX
Where the IndyCar circuit takes on quite possibly its fastest challenge in the Firestone 550k. Texas Motor Speedway makes those little cars look like marbles rolling around a mixing bowl. A really fast mixing bowl.
One second. Give or take a tenth, that’s all that separated Jamie Macmurray from gift wrapping a very special Memorial Day present to his boss, Chip Ganassi.
It’s easy for those of us who stand on the sidelines and chatter to miss just how spectacular Chip’s “almost” was yesterday. The amount of talent and discipline and resource and, yes, luck that it takes to win an Indy 500 is simply mind boggling for most of us.
Ganassi’s guys made it look easy yesterday.
The amount of talent and discipline and resource and, yes, luck that it takes to win a Sprint Cup race on any given Sunday – let alone one of the most desirable “home field” races of the year – is equally mind boggling.
Ganassi’s guys almost got that done yesterday, too.
It’s hard to imagine all of the preparation, the dynamics of the race, strategies, setups, driver skill and timing, just to have it all come down to one second. It’s easy to speculate that somewhere in that mix, Macmurray’s crew should have been able to find him one more second.
But that’s not how it works. In reality, Jamie’s crew did everything humanly possible to put him in a position to win that race. And you’ve got to know he drove his guts out. They put their best on the table when it counted most.
It just wasn’t to be. And, judging by their post-race demeanor, they knew it. There was a better car on the track yesterday in Charlotte. And just as theirs was the car to beat at Indy, they fell just a few ticks short in the Coke 600.
Still, congrats to the Ganassi guys. Does this mean we’re going to have to consider Chip an elite car owner?
btw, Post-race confrontation-wise, it did not look like Kyle Busch wanted anything to do with a very unhappy bearCAT, did it. Not so smug when you’re not surrounded by sheet metal, Kyle?
Let’s wrap up a fabulous Charlotte Race Week 2010.
Coke 600 YouTube Video
Thanks and credit to original posters
Along with many others, NASCAR puts its best foot forward on Memorial Day
Talk about domination. You could tell just how good a race Dario Franchitti had by his performance on the track.
Or you could listen to his primary competitors. In their post-race interviews, Dan Wheldon, Helio Castroneves and even Danica herself all paid homage to Dario’s incredible run.
But it wasn’t all Dario. On a day when even the titans – Penske’s Castroneves and Will Power, not to mention Franchitti’s teammate Scott Dixon – all had troubles in the pits, Dario’s team was flawless and his strategy worked beautifully.
He might have actually won the race by holding back. Television interviews revealed a consensus among drivers that the last pitstop would determine the race winner, and indeed it did.
If you follow our Twitter feed, you know I expected trouble when Dario came out fourth after the last caution. But instead of wrangling messily with the slower cars in front of him, he took his time, knowing each of them had to pit before the race ended.
The only possible flaw in the picture: We’ll never know if he would have had enough fuel to outlast a charging Wheldon. And that would have made an incredible finish, both of them slow-walking their way out of Turn 4 and down the front stretch, striding gingerly toward the checkered flag.
As it worked out, hard-charging wasn’t unique to Wheldon. A hard-charging Mike Conway provided the day’s most devastating and enduring image, enduring a broken leg to show for an accident that could have been much worse.
Let’s wrap up this very memorable Indy 500 race week.
