IndyCar rivals commercial with Scott Dixon

Even though I struggle with IndyCar, I like this commercial with Scott Dixon.

The music, the look. Its very well done.

Atlanta man shatters coast-to-coast 'Cannonball Run' speed record

(by Eliott C. McLaughlin cnn.com 11-3-13)

Before the transcontinental race in "Cannonball Run," the starter tells the gathered racers, "You all are certainly the most distinguished group of highway scofflaws and degenerates ever gathered together in one place."

 

Ed Bolian prefers the term "fraternity of lunatics."

 

Where the 1981 Burt Reynolds classic was a comedic twist on a race inspired by real-life rebellion over the mandated 55-mph speed limits of the 1970s, Bolian set out on a serious mission to beat the record for driving from New York to Los Angeles.

 

The mark? Alex Roy and David Maher's cross-country record of 31 hours and 4 minutes, which they set in a modified BMW M5 in 2006.

 

Bolian, a 28-year-old Atlanta native, had long dreamed of racing from East Coast to West. A decade ago, for a high school assignment, Bolian interviewed Brock Yates, who conceived the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, aka the Cannonball Run.

 

Yates, who played the previously quoted organizer in the film he wrote himself, won the first Cannonball in the early 1970s with a time of 35 hours and 53 minutes.

 

"I told him, 'One day I'd like to beat your record,' " Bolian recalled.

 

Ounce of Prevention

 

It sounds like great outlaw fun -- and certainly, Hollywood added its embellishments, like the supremely confident, infidel-cursing sheik with a Rolls Royce and Sammy Davis Jr. in a priest getup -- but Bolian said it took considerable research and groundwork.

 

Beginning in 2009, about the time he started working for Lamborghini Atlanta, Bolian researched cars, routes, moon phases, traffic patterns, equipment, gas mileage and modifications.

 

He went into preparation mode about 18 months ago and chose a Mercedes CL55 AMG with 115,000 miles for the journey. The Benz's gas tank was only 23 gallons, so he added two 22-gallon tanks in the trunk, upping his range to about 800 miles. The spare tire had to go in the backseat with his spotter, Dan Huang, a student at Georgia Tech, Bolian's alma mater.
 

To foil the police, he installed a switch to kill the rear lights and bought two laser jammers and three radar detectors. He commissioned a radar jammer, but it wasn't finished in time for the trek. There was also a police scanner, two GPS units and various chargers for smartphones and tablets -- not to mention snacks, iced coffee and a bedpan.

 

By the time he tricked out the Benz, which included a $9,000 tuneup, "it was a real space station of a thing," he said, describing the lights and screens strewn through the car's cockpit.

 

Yet he still wasn't done.

 

"The hardest thing, quite honestly, was finding people crazy enough to do it with me," he said.

Co-driver Dave Black, one of the Atlanta Lamborghini dealership's customers, didn't sign on until three days before they left, and "support passenger" Huang didn't get involved until about 18 hours before the team left Atlanta for Manhattan.

 

If his difficulty finding a copilot wasn't an omen, Manhattan would deliver one. While scouting routes out of the city, a GPS unit told Bolian to take a right on red, in the wrong direction down a one-way road. He was quickly pulled over.

 

Bolian got a warning -- and a healthy dose of relief that the officer didn't question the thick odor of fuel as he stood over the vents pumping fumes from the trunk.

 

Record Run Begins

 

The trio ignored what some might have considered a harbinger and the left the Red Ball Garage on East 31st Street, the starting point for Yates' Cannonball, a few hours later. To be exact, they left October 19 at 9:55 p.m., according to a tracking company whose officials asked not be identified because they were unaware that Bolian would be driving so illegally when he hired them.

 

They hit a patch of traffic in New York that held them up for 15 minutes but soon had an average speed of about 90 mph. In Pennsylvania, they tapped the first of many scouts, one of Bolian's acquaintances who drove the speed limit 150 to 200 miles ahead of the CL55 and warned them of any police, construction or other problems.

 

They blew through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, hitting St. Louis before dawn.

 

"Everything possible went perfect," Bolian said, explaining they never got lost and rarely encountered traffic or construction delays.

 

By the time they hit southern Missouri, near the Oklahoma border, they learned they were "on track to break the existing record if they averaged the speed limit for the rest of the trip," he said.

 

Yeah, right. This wasn't about doing speed limits.

 

They kept humming west, and as they neared the Texas-New Mexico border, they calculated they might beat the 30-hour mark, a sort of Holy Grail in transcontinental racing that Bolian likened to the 4-minute mile.

 

Not one to settle, "we decided to break 29," Bolian said.

 

The unnamed tracking company says the Benz pulled into the Portofino Hotel and Marina in Redondo Beach, California, at 11:46 p.m. on October 20 after driving 2,803 miles. The total time: 28 hours, 50 minutes and about 30 seconds.

 

"Most of the time, we weren't going insanely fast," Bolian said, not realizing his definition of "insanely" is a little different from most folks'.

 

When they were moving, which, impressively, was all but 46 minutes of the trip, they were averaging around 100 mph. Their total average was 98 mph, and their top speed was 158 mph, according to an onboard tracking device.

 

"Apart from a FedEx truck not checking his mirrors before he tried to merge on top of me, we didn't really have any issues," Bolian said.

 

Do Not Try This at Home

 

He concedes his endeavor was a dangerous one, especially when you consider Bolian slept only 40 minutes of the trip, and co-driver Black slept an hour. But Bolian went out of his way to make it as safe as possible, choosing a weekend day with clear weather and a full moon -- and routes, when possible, with little traffic or construction.

 

Asked if the technological advances since the previous record holders made their run gave him an advantage, Bolian replied, "Absolutely." Because two teams broke the 32-hour mark in 2006 and 2007, he had a detailed "guide book" on how to do it, where they had to rely on word-of-mouth tales from the 1980s.

 

"I thank Alex for that. We're all adding chapters to the same story of American car culture," Bolian said. Alex Roy did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

 

Bolian had hoped to revisit that high school interview and tell Yates he'd followed through on that promise to break his record, but Yates now suffers from Alzheimer's.

 

"I'll pay him a visit just for the sake of it," Bolian said, "but I can't tell him."

 

Where the Cannonball scofflaws aimed to make a statement about personal freedom, Bolian said he has the utmost respect for law enforcement. His goal was merely to "add myself and pay tribute to this chapter of automotive history," he said.

 

Bolian also hopes that he shattered Roy's record by such a stark margin that it discourages would-be Cannonballers from attempting to break his record, and it's not just a matter of his own legacy, he said.

 

"It really isn't something we need a whole band of lunatics doing," he said.

--------------------

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/31/us/new-york-los-angeles-cannonball-speed-record/

http://edbolian.com/historic-new-york-to-los-angeles-record-cars/

 

 

 

 

2015 Toro Rosso

 

I think Toro Rosso is my new favorite F1 team.

Actually, since the Hakkinen era I really haven't had a favorite F1 team, I've just been a casual fan.

But with 17 year of Verstappen on the team (I always liked his dad when he was with the underdog Arrows team,) their slick looking car, and their "can do" attitude I've really grown to like this team.

2015's F1 season just got a little more interesting for me.

The "New" Indycar Looks a Lot Like the "Old" Indycar

http://www.autoextremist.com/fumes1/

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

Detroit. IndyCar, or INDYCAR as it wants to project itself, opened the 2015 Verizon IndyCar season with the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg with much fanfare, much of it of the self-congratulatory, back-patting variety, I might add. Be that as it may, this was going to be the new deal, an all-new beginning for IndyCar. New aero kits from Chevrolet and Honda would have racing enthusiasts returning to the fold in droves, happy that Indy-style racing was finally retuning to prominence.

Except that none of that happened.

First off, to have the season opener on a ludicrous, truncated street course that does little to showcase the pure speed of these cars is silly. I get the whole "we have to bring the racing to the people" conceit, as that has been used to cajole cities into spending money on races they had no business agreeing to for years. But the St. Petersburg venue leaves much to be desired on so many levels that just to say "well, it's warm, and it works for us as a season opener" isn't an explanation, it's an excuse. And a bad one at that.

And the new carbon-fiber, shrapnel-generating aero kits? Where do I begin?  Quite simply they are an abomination - festering, ugly contraptions that bring nothing to the party in terms of sex appeal. Instead, they're generating a collective groan that I'm hearing from racing enthusiasts everywhere of, "Really, they're going with that? That's the best they got?" And the cut tires and other on-track chaos sure to be caused by them have already become the most talked-about feature of the 2015 season, and it has barely even started. I thought the "praying mantis"-style F1 car era marked the lowest of lows in terms of racing car visual appeal. But this, this is just plain abysmal.

But that isn't even the half of it. Mark Miles, IndyCar's CEO, is hell-bent for the series to "own" an abbreviated season, starting out with races in foreign venues (beginning in 2016) culminating in a season closer over Labor Day weekend, so as not to bump against NCAA football and NASCAR's Chase. But the logic is flawed and the plan is going to be costly, and on more than one level too.

First of all, there is absolutely no danger of IndyCar bumping up against NASCAR or college football - let alone the NFL - because IndyCar doesn't even register in the TV ratings game to begin with, unless we're talking about the Indianapolis 500, so it's a moot point. By pretending that IndyCar will do much better without fighting those forces is a level of delusion that borders on the unfathomable. The reality? The IndyCar season is comprised of one marquee event - the Indianapolis 500 - and a bunch of other basically forgettable events that fill out the schedule. It was like that back in the "old" USAC days and it still is today. It's not an easy pill to swallow for people who are immersed in the sport of Indy-style racing, but it's the High-Octane Truth.

Major league open-wheel racing has become the Sideshow Bob to a sport that is already on the ropes in this country. In fact if it weren't for the rote coverage of NASCAR by America's "stick and ball" media - because that's the only racing that they bother to acknowledge - racing would barely even register in the media at all.

Secondly, team owners like Chip Ganassi, who makes his living by racing, understandably can't see the logic of trying to keep employees of his IndyCar program occupied - and paid - for almost six months with nothing to do. The Mark Miles "vision" for the series isn't financially workable. That's not to suggest that IndyCar should mimic NASCAR's death march of a schedule, but to spread the season out makes more financial sense for everyone concerned.

I am absolutely confounded by IndyCar at this juncture. The Indianapolis 500 is still the greatest single motor race in the world, but the series surrounding it is a chaotic mess. I used to think progress - even in barely noticeable baby steps - would start to snowball into something, but that isn't even remotely the case. What we have is this:

- The aero kits were supposed to bring visual differentiation, raising fan interest. Instead they're ungainly and resolutely unattractive, and with their shrapnel-generating appendages, we can look forward to a season of yellow caution periods, punctuated by occasional bursts of actual racing.

- The Great Hope that repackaging the IndyCar "show" to compete for attention in a changed media landscape has so far been a nonstarter, and I see no indication that will change anytime soon, either.

- Add the abbreviated schedule, the lackluster venues, and a national media that couldn't care less and you're left with what is supposedly a premier open-wheel racing series in this country that's spinning its wheels.

I've said this before and I'll probably say it a thousand more times before I stop doing this website, but racing in a vacuum is not sustainable.

What do I mean by that?

Racing for the edification of the players involved is not enough. It's fine for the drivers and the team owners, and for the few sponsors who have talked themselves into believing that they're getting real value from it, but it's meaningless to the Big Picture media-entertainment landscape, and it's especially meaningless to the racing enthusiasts who want and expect more than that.

And all of this is coming from someone who is a huge enthusiast for the sport and who desperately wants the sport to do better. One who wants it to be much more and to be worthy of our attention.

What IndyCar is doing right now isn't sustainable. The powers that be at IndyCar think they're making a difference, that they finally have the bit in their teeth and they're making a go of it. But all they're really doing is managing the downward spiral. And it cannot continue, it pains me to say.

And for the record, the best racing of the weekend wasn't in St. Petersburg or even Martinsville. It was in Qatar, as the 36-year-old all-time great of motorcylce racing - Valentino Rossi - willed his way past Andrea Dovizioso's Ducati to win the season opener of the 2015 MotoGP season.

If only we had a third of the kind of interest, intensity and passion displayed in Qatar at the IndyCar opener.

Brasilia government forced IndyCar race cancellation in money worry

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/117528

(by Mark Glendenning autosport.com 1-31-15)

IndyCar's scheduled 2015 season-opener at the Brasilia circuit was cancelled due to government concerns about wasting public funds.

According to the Associated Press, public prosecutors warned that the event was "not in the best interests of society" and there was a "clear inversion in the priorities for public spending".

The prosecutors also reportedly identified problems in the contracts that the promoters negotiated with the previous administration, which they claim would have required spending more than $100 million on track upgrades alone for the Autodromo Internacional Nelson Piquet.

The cancellation of the IndyCar race comes at a time when Brasilia is gripped by a severe financial crisis.

A MotoGP race originally scheduled for 2014 was cancelled, and vast amounts of public money were spent on upgrading the Estadio Nacional for last year's football World Cup.

"While all efforts are under way to organise an event not essential to the society of the federal district, public employees are not getting paid," public prosecutors said.

The cancellation on Thursday of what would have been IndyCar's first visit to the venue came as a surprise: two-thirds of the tickets for the race had been sold, and a title sponsor for the race had been announced just one day earlier.

That same day, Tony Cotman, whose company NZR Consulting was in charge of the track upgrade, tweeted images of construction work being carried out at Turn 11.

IndyCar said in a statement that both the series and the paddock are "economically protected" from the cancellation.

There is understood to be a $27 million fine for breach of contract, which the Brasilia government says only applies to the contract between IndyCar and promoter BAND TV.

BAND was also the promoter of the Sao Paulo street race, which ran between 2010 and '13.

Brasilia IndyCar race that would have opened 2015 season cancelled

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/117507

(by Mark Glendenning autosport.com 1-30-15)

IndyCar's planned 2015 season-opener at Brasilia in Brazil has been cancelled.

The series confirmed the cancellation late on Thursday, although no reason was given.

"[Event promoter] BAND announced today that the race scheduled for March 8 in Brasilia has been cancelled," read a statement from IndyCar.

"This comes as a great disappointment, and we will have further comment when we have had the opportunity to talk with all of our partners and the authorities in Brazil."

The event would have been IndyCar's first at the Autodromo Internacional Nelson Piquet, and was set to represent a return to Brazil after the Sao Paulo street race fell off the calendar in 2013.

It is the second new IndyCar fly-away to have been cancelled at the 11th hour in recent years, following on from the abandoned race in Qingdao in China that was slated for 2012.

Brasilia's absence means that St Petersburg will reclaim its status as IndyCar's season-opener when it hosts the series on the last weekend in March.

That race will also mark the debut of the manufacturer-designed aero kits.

Formula 1's pay driver situation 'out of control' reckons Adrian Sutil

(by Ben Anderson and Matt Beer autosport.com 12-21-14)

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/117207

Financial demands that some Formula 1 teams are asking from drivers are 'out of control', claims ousted Sauber racer Adrian Sutil.

Sauber has opted to replace Sutil and Esteban Gutierrez with Felipe Nasr and Marcus Ericsson for 2015 - with both the team's new drivers arriving with generous sponsorship backing.

Asked if he felt budgets were becoming more important than talent, Sutil said that while pay drivers had always been a factor in F1 he felt the current situation was now extreme.

"The budgets some drivers are paying for a year are out of control," he told AUTOSPORT.

"This is not the way it should be.

"It has always been a problem, and it's always more or less been like this.

"There were small teams 20 or 30 years ago where you could buy yourself a cockpit. Now there are less of them and maybe it's more obvious.

"This is something that may never change in Formula 1, but we can make it a little more balanced.

"I remember when Minardi or Arrows were in Formula 1 and were still more or less profitable. And there were maybe a few drivers with sponsorship, but this was not the priority.

"It would be good to have this [situation] back, and then maybe you could call it a sport again.
"Right now, it's hard to say what it is."

While teams under financial pressure have criticised F1's revenue distribution and the costs of the 2014 rules package, Sutil said they had to share responsibility for their economic fortunes.

"First of all I think a few teams maybe have to do their job a little bit better to make things profitable," he said.

"Or on the other side, maybe there's something wrong in the system.

"I don't know the internal details, but there are some teams that manage to be in Formula 1 and make it profitable. It's not a problem, they have sponsors, and they can live with it. Some don't have and they are struggling a lot.
"I'm just a driver, so I don't really know why it's so out of balance. But it shouldn't be like this because it's still a big sport."