Monday, July 28, 2008

Monday Morning news and rumour roundup: July 28

There has been a conspicuous absence of F1 rumours lately so this weeks edition will be more North American based, although I will mention Max Mosely and his lawsuits.

I will start with the dysfunctionality of Andretti-Green racing here in the IRL. This is a team that had absolutely dominated the IRL in 2005 with Dan Wheldon winning the championship and his teammates TOny Kanaan, Dario Franchitti, and Bryan Herta finishing 2nd, 4th, and 8th in the standings respectively. 2006 was not as good but in 2007 they rebouded with Franchitti winning the championship and Kanaan third. It wasn't quite the sueprteam it was in 2005, but they were good. Danica Patrick and Marco Andretti were the other two drivers who struggled but brought the headlines, but it was Dario and Tony, two long time soldiers of the team, two great friends, two of the best in the business who carried the team forward. But things came unglued somewhere between then and now. Partly because of the loss of Dario Franchitti to NASCAR the team unity has fallen apart, badly. Tony Kanaan is still the number one in the team, but he is extremely unhappy. He no longer has his good friend in the team to keep him motivated and has found himself in the thankless position of providing setup to Princess Danica and arrogant twat Marco while poor old Hideki Mutoh just bumbles around. Tony wants out, no question about it and it has to do with the fact that his teammates have taken to ignoring team orders to help Tony in his championship hopes because they don't feel like it, and the two of them (Danica and Marco) are becoming increasingly unpopular within the Andretti Green team. Marco has gone from the happy go lucky son of the team owner to trying to throw his weight around, trouble is that he doesn't have much weight to throw. He is accident prone and he has one race win to Kanaan's fourteen and oh yeah, TK won a championship for AGR in 2004 while Danica is trying to play the big star card and pushing people around but trouble is that she herself has only one win to show for it. Tony is tired of doing most of the setup for his teammates only to be flipped the proverbial bird by these two when he was desperate to get some precious points in his fading championship challenge. Michael Andretti called a closed door meeting with Marco and Danica after the Edmonton race where Marco blatantly ignored team orders over the radio and then collided with teammate Danica, and Danica was a little more subtle about ignoring the team orders by not responding. Nobody is divulging the content of this meeting but apparantly Michael was heard yelling and banging the side of the transporter. Maybe this will be seen as a sign that the team wants to keep Kanaan and push him forward and they will no longer cater to Marco and his young but growing ego, but who knows at this point. We will see but this may be the beginning of the end of AGR as one of the big three teams.

Now that we got the Andretti-Green problem out of the way it is time to address NASCAR, yes NASCAR. I am talking about their problems with tyres at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in yesterday's Brickyard 400. It is well known that the IMS diamond grinds its surfaces and so usually NASCAR tests there in order to prepare itself for his problem. Unfortunately this year with the much maligned car of tomorrow, NASCAR daftly decided against testing at Indy, and the result was that they got to Indy to discover that their tyres could not last more than 10-15 laps at top speed before they got ripped to shreds. This was a major situation for NASCAR and they set about coming up with a solution, albeit one that made the race even more boring than usual. Their solution was to throw a "competition caution" every 10 laps or so to allow people to change tyres. This was not a perfect solution but at least the fans got to see some racing. NASCAR and Goodyear screwed up in their preparation but at least they made an effort to come up with a solution, unlike F1 back in 2005.

Paul Tracy's brilliant run in Edmonton may see him race the rest of the year. Robin Miller of SpeedTV is claiming that Tony George is now actively trying to get something done for at least the last two races if not all four remaining races of the season. There is also a fan campaign to come up with the cash to get Paul on the grid for at least the next race at Kentucky in two weeks. Hopefully we will see Paul race soon because it would be a great shame for the IRL to let such a talent and personality go to waste.

That's it for the moment, the IRL schedule is set to come out this week so I will discuss that, also there will be a Hungarian GP preview and reaction to any major news that happens in the coming days.

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