Indy: A review

No - not that Indy. The big oval rectangular track in Indianapolis. I heard they held a race there today, and figured I'd watch.

I've not paid much attention to the crapwagons IndyCars, preferring the higher-caliber racing in ChampCar. Unfortunately, the sponsors and the fan base could not support two open wheel series - in fact, Tony George's little snit fit almost buried open wheel racing in the U.S. - and the two series unified* this spring. Practically speaking, ChampCar dissolved, with those teams that wanted to continue racing moving to the IRL, where they were sold substandard equipment and almost no spare parts in order to make the change to the lower-tech, normally-aspirated, corn-fueled crapwagons IndyCars.

Anyway, on to the race.

What the heck? Bruno's mirror just decided to shear off? See my comment above about inferior equipment sold to former ChampCar teams. Dale Coyne Racing has been around for a lot of years, always operating on a shoestring, but I have never seen a mirror come flying off before.

Yellows/restarts: Cold tires + 730hp + sudden acceleration = disaster. Apparently, some of those drivers can't add. And what's with the crashes during the yellows?

Track conditions: Good grief, get the blower out on the track and blow the marbles to the outside track wall. I wasn't watching closely enough to see if this was done, but from the number of guys going just slightly offline and skidding on the marbles, it appears it wasn't done often enough. The cars should not have to run below the white line just to make it safely out of the corner.

ABCs graphics: In 1990, ABC won an emmy for their coverage of the Indy 500 (won by Arie Luyendyk, who at the time was a tax client of the firm for which I worked). That broadcast was absolute poetry. Today's was ... not. The graphics took up about 20% of the screen, and really did nothing to add to the experience of the race. By all means, run a crawler across the top of the screen with the running order, and small box (occasionally) showing the lap number, but leave off the rest of the crap. Oh - and the "side-by-side" during commercials? Hate it. I'm willing to bet the sponsors do, too.

Broadcasting team: I have a really cool picture t-shirt showing the closest finish in Indy 500 history, with Al Unser Jr. edging out Scott Goodyear by .043 seconds in 1992. It was fun to see him race, but he really isn't a tv commentator. As for Eddie Cheever - he was a stuck up blowhard when he was driving, and not much has changed. I got the distinct vibe from him that the drivers were doing it all wrong, and he was just the person to correct them.

"Super teams": Isn't the existence of a "super team" - much less three of them - directly contradictory to Tony's "vision" of a low-cost, non-manufacturer driven, all-American driver series? Oops - excuse me - that vision passed a long time ago. Note, however, that Penske, Andretti-Green ( Team Kool Green years ago) and Target-Chip Ganassi Racing all came over to the dark side from ChampCar.

Anyhow, congratulations to Scott Dixon for keeping it out of the marbles, away from the spinning cars and out in front to the end.

*For pities' sake, do NOT refer to this as a "reunification" in my hearing, or I will be forced to hurt you. ChampCar and IndyCar were never one series. In a fit of pique over not being allowed voting seats on the board of CART (he was not a team owner and did not qualify for a seat on the board; CART owners offered him a non-voting seat out of courtesy as he was the owner of the track at Indy), George basically took his marbles and started his own game. At the height of open wheel racing in the US, he fragmented both the advertisers/sponsors and the fan base, effectively dooming both series to a distant second-rate status compared to the juggernaut that is NASCAR. Idiot. Even if I weren't a disgruntled fan, I'd see it as one of the stupidest business decisions ever made.