Wednesday Racing Thread

Open to all subscribers, mostly about F1 (and Indy!) but anything goes

brought to you yet again by “mike o racing”

Formula Unn

It’s great to win - but for any genuinely prideful and ambitious racing driver, it’s far better to display talent. This weekend, Max Verstappen did both. Alonso’s final qualifying lap had already gone into the history books as a possibly unmatchable effort — and indeed, it was an unmatchable effort, unless you were willing to do something that Alonso was not.

In this case, that meant hitting the wall twice, and getting something out of it. to take pole position by an imperceptible margin. The race that followed was a bit more trouble than one might expect, despite a bad strategy call on Aston Martin’s part made it easier, but it was merely a superb drive in a superb car. The qualifying run was something else.

Throw in the astounding quali run by the mercurial and often underperforming Esteban Ocon, and it was at least a Saturday to remember. The race was less interesting, although I am fascinated by the current dynamic over at Mercedes, where “Princess George” is clearly the talent and Hamilton is, ah, basically Mark Webber now. Is Mercedes the third-best car after the updates, or the second-best car, just without an Alonso to push it?

IndyCar

I didn’t watch the 500, but I see that Katherine Legge continues her tradition of massively disappointing all the simps who have sweated blood to make her into a top-flight driver. A particular joy for me, however, was the third-place finish for Santino Ferrucci. Some of you will recall that Jalopnik’s “racing experts”, Alanis King and Elizabeth Blackstock, spent YEARS trying to shit on Santino for a variety of imagined offenses including attempting to run a MAGA decal on his car.

So let’s tally up the recent accomplishments.

Santino: podium at the Indy 500, a permanent albeit minor place in America’s motorsport history

Alanis and Elizabeth: finally delivered one of the worst-reviewed motorsports books in Amazon history, basically a compendium of tweets and an “interview” with a Romain Grosjean supporter.

Turns out it’s better to be the man in the arena than it is to be the woman on the keyboard.

The hotly-contested Prototype 2 class at WHRRI

This is an astoundingly bad video, because I don’t know how to make videos — and for reasons I still don’t understand, there’s a three-second piece of ANOTHER race in the middle of it, like Elaine Benes dancing at the end of “Cry, Cry Again”, but it will at least give you a sense of what it’s like to drive at Waterford Hills.

In the feature race, I both qualified and finished fourth of 17 overall. My most likely competitor, the “Hidari Firefly” of Vaughan Scott, couldn’t start the weekend for mechanical reasons, so I was basically the meat in a sandwich between smaller formula cars that didn’t have my pace and FE2s that can drop me in a straight line AND around the turns.

I’d bought my first-ever set of new Hoosiers for this race — until now, I’ve been running on used ones supplied by John Berget Racing — in hopes of taking the fight to Vaughan. He has the P2 lap record here, at 1:04.671.

“You’re not gonna get there in your Radical,” he told me, as we watched another class race. “Fastest Radical around here was a Prosport with a GSX-R engine from a few years ago, he had a 1:14 or so.” This seemed reasonable, because the front-running P2 cars are a full ten seconds ahead of me at Mid-Ohio.

Something about this track really flatters my little PR6, however — likely it’s the lack of long straights — and I ended up turning in a 1:08.602 in the final lap of Sunday’s feature race. Not a Verstappen’s worth of brilliance, but not bad for a 51-year-old man with a balky gearbox and carburetors. Oh — and I never put the new tires on. Had I done that, I might have taken second place; just one second a lap’s worth of pace would have put me ahead of everyone but the leader.

Those of you who are racers or autocrossers might appreciate this: I’m only hitting exactly 110.0 mph on the back straight of Waterford Hills, but in the final corner I am recording a sustained 8.3 seconds at a minimum of 1.62g and a maximum of 1.71g. That sort of cornering simply isn’t possible in a traditional street car or sports-car-based racer, and it makes a lot of the Radical-related trials and tribulations worthwhile.

Other series

Chase Elliott is apparently in trouble, with a one-race suspension, for a deliberate wreck at the Coca-Cola 600. It looks pretty gnarly. NASCAR is in a tough position of trying to simultaneously venerate the Earnhardt-esque tradition of hard racing that keeps fans coming back and, you know, keeping their drivers alive. I don’t envy them.