Wednesday Racing Thread

Free to all subscribers, focusing on F1, IndyCar and NASCAR this week but anything goes

this is what is known as “magical thinking”

Two bits of housekeeping before we dive in:

• Ross Bentley has a lovely article on track limits this week;

• The august Robert Farago is selling his 6-speed manual conversion Ferrari 360 on BaT with two days to go; it’s worth a look.

Alright, to business.

(TO BUSINESS! *clink*)

Now THIS is podracing…

After watching both the sprint and main F1 races this past weekend, I am more convinced than ever that Max Verstappen is the finest open-wheel driver in history — before you adjust for era and training, of course. Who knows what Fangio could have done in the Mercedes W11, or what use Schumacher (Michael, not Ralf) could have made of today’s simulator tech?

Personally, I like to contemplate what Laurent Fignon could have done with Lance Armstrong’s, er, doctors.

That’s all academic, however. What matters right now is that Verstappen is closer to a perfect driver than we have ever seen before. Yes, the Red Bull is the best car in the field, but it was also the best car when Sebastian Vettel was driving it and somehow nobody ever confused Seb with a legendary driver, largely because he kept crashing into: walls, tires, co-drivers. It’s possible to make very heavy weather, in the famous words of Patrick Head regarding Jacques Villeneuve, of winning in the best car.

On a day when track limits were more important than tire strategy (and when Alonso cannily predicted he would only need to be within ten seconds of Sainz in order to triumph after the inevitable reshuffle) Verstappen was one of the few drivers who never bothered stepping over the line, even as he put a second a lap on Checo’s identical car behind him. He had enough time in hand to demand, and receive, a set of fresh tires at the end of the race, over the objections of his strategist.

(A moment of appreciation in that regard as well for Charles Leclerc, who has simply stopped listening to the pit wall and as a consequence managed his first decent result in living memory.)

Put anyone else in the Red Bull and you have a topsy-turvy season like 2007. With Max behind the wheel there is basically zero doubt. And he could race for… fifteen more years? Longer? Look at how dangerous Alonso still is. Surely Max could do the same.

Other observations:

• Definitely a big weekend for Princess George, making his own call to beat Sir Lewis in the sprint then simply minding his Ps and Qs better for the adjusted triumph on Sunday.

• About that… In the above linked article, Ross Bentley suggests that Sir Lewis took a bit of the shine off his reputation this weekend, and I agree. He truly seems to be the only driver on the grid who has matured in reverse, arriving in his rookie year as a cool-headed fearless killer then slowly degenerating into someone who harangues his team to the point that Toto Wolff had to publicly ask him to just shut up and drive the car. His best call would be to retire at the end of the season and accept the historical position of Formula One’s Roger Maris. Alternately, he could do something to demonstrate his love of the sport like… buy in at Williams, team up with Alex Albon as a player-coach, and demonstrate his remarkable wheel-to-wheel ability in the midfield, to everyone’s delight.

• Norris > Piastri, it’s so obvious now, can anyone even remember why there was a fight over getting Piastri’s services?

• Speaking of Williams… maybe it’s a half-decent car, the undistinguished floorpan aside? Albon has never looked this respectable before, while Sergeant is so far out of his depth in Formula One it’s impossible to make any judgments based on their relative performance.

• The laps where it looked like Hulkenberg could podium… this is why grown men cry.

IndyCar at MidOhio!

I was wandering around my barn when Pagenaud crashed and I was on a plane when the actual race was happening, so I didn’t get much benefit from being MidOhio’s neighbor this past weekend. I did make it to qualifying, just to ooh and ah at how late the IndyCars get to brake for stuff. They slow down from 180 on the back straight using the same brake point that I use in my smaller Radical to come down from 133!

I’d like to see the “spec cars” do a whole road course series. I bet people would watch it with intense interest. There’s a world of track rats and club racers and Lemons types nowadays who would follow it the way they follow F1 now. Call it CART or something. Get more than one chassis, more than one engine. Make sure Santino Ferrucci is involved.

NASCAR at Chicago

All I know is that the winner had never run a NASCAR race before, so fill me in.

In memoriam

Young Dilano van 't Hoff lost his life in a Formula Regional race this weekend. I can only imagine how his father felt; you don’t get to what is basically F3 at the age of eighteen without a dad who pays the bills and kicks your ass along the way. A few years ago, watching my 12-year-old son jump almost thirty feet of clear air gap on a child’s 24-inch-wheel bicycle outside Bentonville, it occurred to me that were he to be paralyzed on the asphalt landing it would be entirely my fault. Between this and the driver who died at Mid-Ohio a few weeks back in a regional kart series… well, it’s something to consider.

And yet it can go the other way, too. Your son can be Max Verstappen almost as easily as he can die on track. Which is to say that both outcomes are possible. Rare, but possible. And you won’t know until it’s too late to make a difference. If you choose to expose your son to danger, that’s your choice and your cross to bear. But if you choose to be a coward on his behalf? You won’t see the consequences of that in a life flight helicopter leaving the paddock. Doesn’t mean they won’t exist.