Sunday, July 13, 2008

Indycar snorefest at Nashville

I am going to start by saying that I am not the world's biggest fan of Oval racing, especially not the four hour snoozers of NASCAR, but I do occasionally watch an IndyCar series oval race and find it genuinely exciting, Texas this year was an example, but last nights processional at Nashville was definitely not one of those races. The track is notorious for being tough to pass on because it has a concrete surface, making it extremely slippery. This race was also coupled with the fact that there was a threat of rain the whole night, something which ultimately stopped the race 30 laps early and so the winners were the ones who gambled late on and this time it was the Chip Ganassi drivers Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon, who elected not to pit for fuel and tyres 60 laps from the scheduled end under caution when everyone else did. This gave them vital track position and on a track where you can't pass they ran 1-2 when the race restarted and prayed for rain. They got it just in time as they would have had to pit within five laps of the red flag coming out, which would have handed the race to third placed Helio Castroneves. The rest of the race was one which was relatively incident free with only two crashes taking place, the first when the over eager Marco Andretti lost it on lap four and collided with the unfortunate Ryan Briscoe and the other when Ryan Hunter-Reay got bottled up in traffic, went into the marbles, and smacked the wall hard. The rest of the time was a procession of cars following each other with the only passing coming as a result of drivers losing momentum in traffic. On lap 135 or so the Safety Car came out because of slight moisture on the track and when the race restarted the only real pass took place all night when Helio Castroneves in fifth place got a great jump on the restart-challenged Danica Patrick to swoop by into fourth and then carried that momentum down the back straight where he got a tow from a backmarker and swooped into third in front of Tony Kanaan. Brazilian taxi drivers would be proud the way he cut TK off like that. Unfortunately despite a faster car all he could do from there was hope that the rain held off long enough to force the Ganassi cars to pit, which did not happen. So Scott Dixon won his third straight race at Nashville to extend his lead in the championship over Castroneves to 63 points but it was all due to sheer luck of the weather. Dixon and Wheldon played the Gambler at Nashville and came up aces, Kenny Rodgers would be proud.

No comments: