News and notes: Thursday July 31

The biggest piece of news of the week is the release of the 2009 IndyCar season schedule. After a sort of disjointed and last minute created 2008 schedule, the 2009 season will be the first truly unified season schedule. The current version has 18 races to be run between April 5 and October 11, 2008. The most notable omission is Surfers Paradise, a staple of CART/Champ Car and a race that always draws huge crowds, it's only drawback being that it is in Australia. The IRL organizers had hoped to twin it with the race at the Twin Ring Motegi in Japan to reduce costs but some sort of complications with a major Rugby tournament in September has resulted in no deal being reached. The IRL are insisting that there is still a space available for a race in Australia if the two sides can come to an agreement, but seeing as the willingness to budge of the IRL side is limited there is very little chance that a race will happen in Australia next year, 2010 maybe but dear Aussie friends, don't get your hopes up. Toronto returns to the schedule which is good news as the Toronto race was always one of the best attended races in CART/Champ Car but one suspects that a high attendance will depend on the presence of Paul Tracy in an IndyCar next year. The one surprise that has had a lot of fans fuming is the choice of season finale venues, Homestead-Miami speedway. The Homestead race has been poorly attended the last few years and people were expecting that track to get the axe and be replaced by Las Vegas, which would be a more glamorous location for a finale, but alas it was not to be and so the IRL is going back to the empty grandstands at Homestead. There are also a lot of fans mystified at the lack of former CART/Champ Car venues that traditionally drew great crowds like Cleveland airport or Road America. There were also rumours that New Hampshire motor speedway and Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama were being considered for races next year but that did not materialize. In all the schedule has 10 ovals and 8 road/street circuits and here is the final(ish) schedule
April 5: Streets of St. Petersburg
April 19: Streets of Long Beach
April 26: Kansas Motor Speedway
May 24: Indianapolis Motor Speedway (Indy 500)
May 31: Milwaukee Mile
June 6: Texas Motor Speedway
June 21: Iowa Speedway
June 27: Richmond International Raceway
July 5: Watkins Glen International
July 12: Streets of Toronto
July 26: Edmonton city centre Airport
August 1: Kentucky Speedway
August 9: Mid Ohio Sports Car course
August 23: Infineon raceway
August 29: Chicagoland Speedway
September 6: The raceway at Belle Isle Park
September 19: Twin Ring Motegi
October 11: Homestead-Miami Speedway

Next up is a bit of Formula One news and it has to do with McLaren's 2009 Driver Lineup and the fact that it will not change. Heikki Kovalainen has been confirmed foe next year despite him having a ratehr poor season compared to teammate Lewis Hamilton. Heikki has only been marginally slower than Lewis but has had absolutely rotten luck and finds himself well down in the standings compared to Lewis. This is good news for Kovalainen as there were many rumours surrounding his future at McLaren and hopefully the personable Finn can win some races soon as he deserves it.

There are rumours abound that Paul Tracy will race in the three final races of the IRL season at Infineon raceway, Belle Isle Park, and Chicagoland speedway. Hopefully this is true but one has to take such rumours with a grain of salt as his presence seems to rely solely on money at the moment, sad for such a great champion.

This week the F1 circus are at the dull Hungaroring in beautiful Budapest and the NASCAR nationwide series is racing at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, I will preview these two races tomorrow.

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.

Edmonton Race Report: Dixon wins, Tracy impresses.

A great afternoon was had by most yesterday as the IndyCar boys and girls (just one this time) took to the bumps of Edmonton's city centre airport. Scott Dixon won the race, which is not too surprising and he was followed home by Helio Castroneves. The two title contenders ran nose to tail in the later stages and were fortunate that they decided to call the race due to time four laps early, had that not happened they probably would have neeeded a splash and dash, which would have spiced things up a little, but alas they did not and so Dixon coasted to victory to extend his championship lead. The real story however was the man who finished fourth, one Paul Tracy. PT started fifteenth but quickly worked his way through the field to run solidly in the top ten, a result which would have been encouraging to the team, but due to a good pitstop under caution he came up and was running a solid sixth when there was contact between fourth and fifth placed Oriol Servia and Dan Wheldon. Both drivers had wounded cars and tried to limp home, this allowed PT to overtake them, including getting by Servia right at the line on the last lap. This result will be huge and Robin Miller is now reporting that Vision racing are working to get Paul in a car for two more races, Sonoma and the finale at Chicagoland speedway. Paul provided a lot of road course experience and knowledge to the team and was apparently very well received within the Vision team. If Penske, Ganassi, and Vision go home happy, Andretti green racing will leave Canada furious with the way things went. Team number one Tony Kannan had to change his engine and so started at the back while the other three drivers, Marco Andretti, Danica Patrick, and Hideki Mutoh could only manage to qualify in the midfield. In the race Kanaan worked his way up to a solid 9th but the other three drove like clowns. Hideki Mutoh was the first of the three to have difficulties when he crashed heavily on lap 27. The other two drove unspectacularly until late on when Marco Andretti commited a cardinal sin of racing by ramming Patrick damaging both cars. Both continued but their race was ruined. Marco was probably happy that he could keep going for more laps because it would protect him from the bullets that his team bosses were probably ready to throw at him. There were also some question marks about team work as Marco refused to let the faster Kannan by when ordered to and Danica's radio was mysteriously not working when she was asked to move over as well. There was a closed door meeting after the race and apparantly Kanaan was very grumpy afterwards not revealing the nature of the meeting, although it doesn't take a PhD to figure it out....... Down in the field the usual gang of idiots were up to their old tricks of causing trouble with poor Graham Rahal being in the wrong place at the wrong time, twice. At the start Graham was hit by Mario Moraes and had to make a lengthy stop for repairs. Graham rejoined and was minding his own business when EJ Viso tried to pass someone, locked his brakes, and punted into the side of poor Graham's car. Rahal was sent spinning into the tyre barrier, his day over. Back in the pits he was not happy with Viso (understandably) and did not mince words with his comments. Both he and fellow son of former champion Marco Andretti have been fast but have gotten into numerous incidents, mostly their fault, and maybe it was some poetic justice for Grahamm but this time it was truly not his fault. Many drivers have complained about Viso this year and EJ got a fifteen second stop/go penalty for his antics this time but I think that we will see more EJ caused accidents before the year is out. Other drivers had spins here and there, the most notable being Tony Kanaan going for a loop while leading the race and Helio Cstroneves having a big lock up late on while pushing Dixon, depriving us of a potential grandstand finish. Justin Wilson came home third for a very solid podium, proving that he is a very good road racer but needs to work on his oval skills. Marty Roth was painfully slow and got in the way as usual but he did not hit anything, although he ended the day backwards on the grass after spinning with two laps to go. The IRL should force him to attach a warning triangle to the back of his car as he is clearly not talented enough for this level of motorsport. The IRL's next race is in two weeks at Kentucky speedway where we will see the return of everyones favourite owner driver and hard worker Sarah Fisher.

Edmonton Indy, Qualifying report

So the dust settled on qualifying to find us with a Penske 1-2 with Ryan Briscoe on the pole this time. All the pracitce times and promising runs by some came to nought as the big boys in the Penske cars came to the front. This is not to say that the Big former Champ Car teams were disappointing, which they weren't as the KV drivers are third and fifth on the grid, veteran Oriol Servia being higher on the grid than Will Power this time. The Penske drivers have been great on the last three road courses as they scored a 1-2 last week at Mid-Ohio and Briscoe was the fastest man all day at Watkin's Glen only to lose the race as a result of the cruel hand of fate. Helio Castroneves has been the most consistent driver for most of the season but hasn't been able to get a win while championship leader Scott Dixon, who has not been as quick of late, has continually managed to pop up in the top five to limit the damage done by Helio. Dixon starts fourth while teammate Dan Wheldon will have another tough day, he starts 9th. The other top ten drivers are former Champ Car teams and a big shout out to the Dale Coyne drivers who were nowhere in practice but suddenly popped up in qualifying, both men made in to Q2 and Bruno Junquiera just missed out making final qualifying while rookie Mario Moraes will start a decent 10th. The Newman/Haas/Lanigan boys also did a good job with Justin Wilson making it into the fast six only to have a shunt on his first flying lap in the final session having to settle for sixth. One suspects we will see a lot of him at the front in today's race while teammate Graham Rahal was a solid 8th. If all these former champ car teams and Ganassi an Penske were in the top ten then it leads to the question of what happened to the Andretti-Green driver? The answer is that they had a woeful afternoon. Both Marco Andretti and Tony Kanaan were fast enough to make the first cut but at the end of Q1 Kannan spun off and damaged his engine, unfortunately IRL rules dictate that an engine change means you have to go to the back of the pack and starting near Marty Roth can only be trouble. Marco ended up having a poor Q2 and was slowest in that session, so he will start 12th alongside the surprisingly quick Enrique Bernoldi, who is apparently fighting for his job, he surprised many by making it into Q2 and will start a very impressive 11th. Media favourites and resident hotheads Danica Patrick and Paul Tracy flattered only to decieve and will line up 14th and 15th respectively. Danica was nowhere in practice and so 14th cannot be considered to bad for her while PT was really quick in practice and will be disappinted with 15th although he is ultra agressive and will try to make it through the field, if he can make it through the first corner in one piece. The other Andretti Green dude, Hideki Mutoh was a rather poor 21st and will probably lose a lot of points to Will Power in the rookie of the year points. The rest of the grid is unsurprising with Ryan Hunter Reay 13th, Vitor Meira 16th followed by AJ Foyt IV, Darren Manning, Mario DOminguez, EJ Viso, Mutoh, Buddy Rice, Ed Carpenter, Townsend Bell, Marty Roth, Jaime Camara and the unfortunate TOny Kannan. A word about Marty Roth and his dreadful pace in qualifying. His time of 1:09.049 was more than 8 second off pole and five second slower than the next slowest Jaime Camara. His time is actually slower than the slowest qualifier in the Atlantic series race by 0.6 seconds and has been brutally slow all weekend. The IRL really needs to introduce time controls to weed out the field filling wankers like Roth to be taken seriously. The IRL needs to introduce some sort of time margin for qualifying so that Marty and company will be sent home. On suspects that the IRL may review his racing license at seasons end, not soon enough in this critic's opinion.

Edmonton Indy, Thursday Practice report

So day 1 in Edmonton is complete with things being dominated by two teams, Team Penske and, to the surprise of some, KV racing. The two teams shared the top four in both sessions today, the first one being dominated by Penske, with Castroneves ahead of Briscoe followed by Will Power and Oriol Servia, and the second session seeing that reversed with Power and Servia 1-2 followed by Castroneves and Briscoe. It was an eventful day with pretty much every driver having moments at some time due to the bumpy nature of the airport circuit. The plentiful amount of run off area meant that most drivers avoided hitting things with the exception of EJ Viso, who crashed in the first session and did not take part in the second one. Townsend Bell had the most excitment having an armful of spins and off track excursions, he was 25th in both sessions. Paul Tracy caused the most excitement by running well in both sessions of his first IRL race since the controversial 2002 Indy 500 when he finished second officially but many think that he had passed winner Helio Castroneves just before the yellow flags came out, but we digress. The other Canadian, Marty Roth was in his usual position at the tail end of the field, in the morning session he was 4.4 seconds slower than the next slowest driver, Jaime Camara, and in the second session he was "only" 2.3 seconds behind next slowest Townsend Bell. If the old 107% rule from Formula One was in force, these times would not be fast enough for Mad Dog Marty to qualify. Will Power's fastest time of the first day of practice is three seconds slower than his fastest time in last years first day of practice and highlights the need to boost the power of these cars on road courses. Qualifying should be itneresting tomorrow with so many cars being so close in time it could be anyone but Marty Roth's day. WIth the exception of the aforemention Roth, everyone was within 2.6 seconds in the second practice session. This could be an incident filled race, but with plenty of runoff there should not be too much need for the Safety Car, unfortunately the IRL will probably not figure that one out.

Race Preview, Rexall Edmonton Indy

The IndyCar sereis makes it's only visit to Canada this year with a race in Edmonton. The race track, a temporary one at the Edmonton City centre Airport is a great track and has been hugely popular since the race's inception as a Champ Car race in 2005. As the only points-paying race converted from Champ Car where all the field competes it could be a golden opportunity for some of the transition teams to score a win on a track they are familiar with, in fact Justin Wilson has won this race back in 2006. Eight drivers have raced here before and four have gotten podiums here including Wilson, who won in 2006 and was second last year, Paul Tracy, who was third back in 2005, Graham Rahal, who was third last year, and Oriol Servia, who was second in 2005. The other four who have raced here include Mario Dominguez, whose best finish was fifth in 2005, Bruno Junquiera. whose best finish was seventh last year, Will Power's best finish was sixth in 2006 and Ryan Hunter Reay was sixteenth in his only start here back in 2005. If I were to pick a driver among these few drivers to come through with a surprise victory it would be Oriol Servia. He has been consistently quick all year and has usually manged to bring the car home in solid points positions., he deserves a win as he has been one of the hardest working drivers over the past few years. This race will also see the much anticipated return of Paul Tracy to the cockpit. The aggressive and animated Canadian has a one race deal and will want to show well to convince his sponsors to pay for more races this year with a view to getting him a full schedule next year. In total 27 cars have entered the race with the only driver change of the 26 cars who raced last week is the re-emergence of Townsend Bell for Dreyer and Reinbold replacing Milka Duno, who was horribly off the pace last weekend (according to my calculations, had F1's old 107% rule existed she would not have qualified for the race). Bell is a decent driver who will be looking for a good result here in order to prove to teams that he would be a legitimate choice for a full time ride next year. At the front Newman/Haas/Lanigan will probably join the big three of Penske/Ganassi/and Andretti-Green at the top of the timesheets, although KV racing could also be up there. Both Penske and both Ganassi drivers are great road racers, as are two of the four AGR drivers (Marco Andretti and Tony Kanaan) and so it should be a lively race up front, and with Edmonton being a track conducive to overtaking we should have some drama. Unfortunately the fans will not be treated to cars as quick as they were last year as it is estimated that the IndyCar Dallara is aproximately 5 seconds per lap slower than the Panoz DP-01 cars who raced here last year and there are calls to boost the horsepower of the Honda engines for the road courses. As some of the oval specialist drivers continue to get better on Road courses there will not be any real drivers but Marty Roth who will be off the pace. Hopefully this leads to a lot of good racing among the 27 drivers and qualifyuing could be very close, leading to some surprises among those knocked out in the earlier rounds. Qualifying is Friday and Saturday the race starts at 3pm local time, 5 pm eastern time.

Monday Morning rumour roundup, July 21

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, here is a quick round-up of the rumours circulating in the F1 and IndyCar worlds

We will start in F1 where Ross Brawn has insisted that he will keep the same driver lineup at Honda for 2009. While it is admirable that he wants some continuity in his team, Jenson Button and Rubens Barichello drove like idiots at Hockenheim and there could potentially be some talented drivers on the market. Ross wants to concentrate on next year and building a good car, but I can't see Honda winning a championship with their current drivers.

Last week I said that Forsythe was planning to enter Indy Lights next year and it appears that he may have bigger ambitions than that with reports that he is planning an IRL team and an American Le Mans series team. Plus he plans on running Indy Lights and Formula Atlantic. This seems very ambitious and although we know that Gerry has deep pockets, It does not make sense to be shelling out all that money for teams in four different racing series' He must have some sort of sponsor in mind at least for the IRL.

Tony Kanaan appears to be playing hardball with his Andretti Green Racing team. According to Robin Miller of Speed TV he has given his team until August 1 to sign him to a new contract or he will start talking to other teams. This does not make a whole lot of sense on Kanaan's part as he the other top two teams in the sport, Penske and Ganassi, appear unlikely to dump one of their drivers at the current time and a move to any other team would be taking a step backwards. He has the opportunity to win races and championships at AGR and if he wants to remain a contender he has to suck up any bones of contention he has with his team and, I guess, more specifically Marco Andretti and concentrate on driving.

The rumour mill will be churning about a potential return of Peugeot to the Formula One world. Peugeot chief Jean-Claude Lefebvre was seen in the F1 paddock at Hockenheim claiming to be on Holiday. Peugeot's last venture into F1 was not terribly succesful having never won a race having supplied the McLaren, Jordan, and Prost teams between 1994 and 2000. The Engines were known to be powerful but horrendously unreliable and they ended up deciding that they were wasting their money putting engines in the back of terrible Prost cars and left F1. I return does not make much sense from a business point of view in the current F1 economic structure as Peugeot are heavily concentrated on their 24 Hours of Le Mans effort which came up painfully short this year. I doubt we will see Peugeot Engines in the back of F1 cars for the next few years at least, especially with the future of the French Grand Prix in doubt.

Stay tuned for opinions and reviews of this weekends Edmonton Indy. I will be having in depth coverage without being there, but I will have reports on all days of the competition.