Rock-'Em Sock-'Em Racing at Richmond

The IRL ran it's shortest track of the season and it showed last night as many drivers made the utmost effort to look like complete idiots and to cost their team owners a lot of money in the process. This race also highlighted the jarring fact that the IRL spends far too much time behind the safety car in their races and with all the crashes and incidents last night, the viewer was left bored by seeing cars trundle around at slow speeds, no wonder people are changing the channel instead. Case in point of this was right at the start when in the run toward the Green flag Ryan Hunter-Reay spun and did not hit anything. Ok so they brought out the safety car and he got up to speed and by the time the cars had come around once he at the back of the pack and they could have gone green after two laps, but no the IRL decided to keep the Safety Car out for SIX frickin' laps, with no debris on the track, no cars in the wall, nothing. So we waited and got bored until the cars rolled out again and the rookies starting hitting things and taking each other out and the veterans looked like muppets, Marty Roth got in the way but managed to avoid hitting anything and Tony Kanaan won the race from Helio Castroneves and Scott Dixon. Not a whole lot notable happened but here is the list of people who stuffed their cars into the wall: Will Power, AJ Foyt IV, Ed Carpenter (after having been hit by John Andretti) Bruno Junqueira, Buddy Rice, Ryan Briscoe, John Andretti (who this time took Oriol Servia with him), Graham Rahal (again), Mario Moraes, Ryan Hunter-Reay (whose second boob actually took him out), and Jaime Camara. This crash-fest saw 9 Safety Car periods for 102 laps (a Third of the Frickin' race and they probably could run 25-30 fewer laps behind the SC). The IRL was a dud, at least there was a good crowd, but if you like crashes-filled races then it was a good one and with the IRL going to Watkin's Glen (a real race track) next week there should be some more thrills and spills.

Oh and on a side note, congratulations to Patrick Carpentier for getting his first pole in NASCAR sprint cup, this will not result in me watching the race, but I will check the results afterwards to see how you did, and in my case that is impressive enough.