10:33 a.m. Welcome back to Kansas Speedway. Once again, the story here starts with air temperature. It's sunny but the air temp was 49 when I rolled out of bed this morning. Too cold to go 210 mph around a track, so Firstone Indy Lights qualifying was delayed 30 minutes.
The Indy Lights cars are on the track. You can tell it's them by the sound they make. Lower pitched, lower RPM. Remind me of a sprint car sound. We got a couple minutes to kind of clean out the recorder from the bullpen yesterday.
(Last updated 7:04 p.m.)
Ryan Briscoe: "The car's going pretty solid out there. We seem to be a little bit down on speed to a couple of guys so we got a bit of work to do. The positive is the car is really good in traffic."
Q: "Indy?"
Briscoe: "For sure we are going to go there to win it. I'd love to get number 15 for Roger and number 1 for myself; I couldn't think of anything better in the world right now but it's going to be tough. You got so much competition at the moment there are such little difference in speeds from car to car team to team there is a lot of work to do. I'm really excited. I got a little taste of it last year being on a satellite team to Penske. This year I can't really imagine what it's going to be like but I feel ready for it and hopefully I can tackle the task."
Q: "Ryan Hunter Reay, you've been rocking this year so far, what do you attribute that to?"
RHR: "I attribute that to my driving and learning a little bit more about how to go IRL racing on the superspeedways. It's a different kind of racing, momentum racing, which I think it will take the Champ Car guys a bit of time to get used to. That and setting the car up to my liking on the ovals. I know exactly what I want out o the Dallara now and that takes a little bit of time. I think over the span of 6 or 7 races we've gathered that together. That was the whole point of hooking up with a team midway through the team 2007 so that in the begin of 2008 we could be doing exactly what we're doing."
Q: "As a former CART driver, do you sympathize with the drivers who come from road/street only backgrounds?"
RHR: "I sympathize with drivers who have to jump into cars that haven't been out there racing before. These ovals can be daunting at times. They are learning are earning their money, that's for sure. I don't sympathize with anything Champ Car, that's for sure." (RHR has some adverse history with Champ Car.)
Q: "Is this a big race for ethanol?"
RHR:" This is a really important race for ethanol. This is our home race, this and Iowa, and we have a lot of guests here and a lot of people in the stands wearing our colors. And ethanol deserves the top five or top three. We've been right there to do it and circumstances have kept us doing that. Our time will come keep doing the job."
Q: "Will you be the first non big-three team to win?"
RHR: "That's certainly our goal. I think we can bring a podium fight to it. I'm not talking about winning yet though."
Q: "Darren Manning, doing better this year, what up?"
Manning: "Now I've got a car I can race. I can roll off and I'm comfortable straight way, and then we can start finding more speed. And it takes a long time because it's always the very,very small details. We didn't have good setups last year until the end of the race. Now we've got good setups on the car and we can race with them. I might not be able to qualify with them but we can race with them because my car lasts a full stint on tires it lasts a full race without trying to bang the walls down."
Q: "Been working out?"
Manning: "2006 was a lean year for me. I didn't get to drive much. The cars I did had power steering, the prototype cars and GT cars. Getting back in the 07 the first couple races were really pretty hard. I was back in shape by mid-season I had to keep it going. Over the winter I had five or six months of doing nothing so you have to keep it going."
Q: "More pints of beer tonight (Saturday, 4/26)?"
A: "Yeah, it's a late start so I might have a couple." (Manning accent: "coop-le."
Gotta go patrol around. Back in a bit.
7:04 p.m.
Danny Wheldon is representing about his win in the press conference room right now. Kind of a nutty race. We had the Initial Feeling Out phase, the What Will Danica Do phase, the Dixon Got Screwed Again phase and then the Will Dixon Catch the Leaders ending.
Not sure what happened to Danicker. I saw her pit and then she sat. BLOWN UP, Sir, I guess.
Let me avail myself of the excellent PR resources here. Hang on ... Arnie the Insider tells me Danica had a "hub failure." They went to change the wheel and the hub said "Negative, Ghost Writer ..." Props to Arnie for the most excellent Top Gun reference.
The big news is that Bev Patrick and her family are definitely stalking me. Oh yeah. She's following me around. Every time I look up, there's Danica's mom. I went over to the merchandise area to rent a scanner and I ran into a crowd scene in front of the Danica trailer. Dude, they were about seven deep buying stuff. It was a full-on cash harvest. So I'm just kind of hanging out, watching the American economy in action and there's DANICA'S MOM.
Bev is definitely following me around. She was there with a group of people who appeared to be Danica relatives based on family resemblance and how Bev interacted with the posse. Although she's obviously stalking me, Bev played it cooled and pretended not to notice the blockish blogger standing at a distance. She's a cool customer. I think I saw TJ inside the trailer moving the product. KIDDING. I'm a kidder.
Right next to the Danica crowd scene was the Target merchandise trailer with nobody in front of it. OMG. How sad was that? Main reason being that the Target merch, I'm sorry, is not cool. I tried to find a Scott Dixon shirt to buy there and they mainly appeared to be designed by high school graphic arts classes. Dude. Upgrade the merch. BLACK is the racing color, OK?
Anyway, I went up to find a seat in the stands and observe the pre-race festivities (Section 259), drink a gin and tonic, 16-ounce Bud and margarita (in that order) and Danica's family comes up and sits about six rows down from me. Seriously. Same group that met with Bev at the merch tent. Creepy. Pretty obvious the Patricks want to hang out with the pdog. Give me a call. We'll hang at the Iowa Speedway.
I hear there was almost a dirt-track style brawl in the pit between EJ Viso and Ed Carpenter. I guess EJ caused Ed distress and Ed marched down to discuss it. Paging Security Chief Charles. I guess it didn't turn into GO TIME. I'll have to check the tape to get the details on that.
Earlier in the day, I sat in on a press conference with the Ethanol Information and Promotion Council (EPIC), which is an association of ethanol producers, corn growers, plant operators, etc. EPIC got together to basically call bullshit on all the stories that ethanol production alone is causing food prices to rise and people to starve to death.
Front and center was Dave Vander Griend, owner of ICM Inc., of Colwich, KS, which designs and builds ethanol plants. Dave is from a little down near my hometown in Northwest Iowa. He's also the ethanol yoda. Helped build the first ethanol fuel still ever given a permit by the ATF about 30 years ago. Dave said when you're trying to bridge the river to energy independence, biofuels are the first section of the bridge. Not the entire bridge, but the first section. They don't get you all the way to energy independence, but they do get you part of the way. Other sections of the bridge have to be added to make it all the way.
Personally, I don't buy the "people are starving in Ethiopia because of ethanol" argument. And, I'd rather pay a farmer in Indiana or Iowa for fuel than some guy in Saudi Arabia.
I gotta hit the road and drive my E10 (10% ethanol, 90% gasoline mixture) powered car back to Des Moines. I'll have some deluxe race notes Monday. If you haven't been to an IndyCar race, OMG, you gotta go to one. Pick one out nearest you and start making plans. I highly recommend Kansas and Chicagoland, but you gotta see a race live.
I'm outta here for Des Moines. Thanks for tuning in. Can't wait to catch the DVR of the race broadcast.
pressdog .... out.
>The Indy Lights cars are on the track. You can tell it's them by the sound they make. Lower pitched, lower RPM. Remind me of a sprint car sound.<
Apparently it's been too long since you've heard a sprint car.
Indy Lights make a extremely painful to listen to sound, somewhat like small block V8's with two or more cylinders disconnected. Without doubt, the worst sounding race car in the history of motor sports.
Posted by: BL | May 01, 2008 at 10:00 PM