When I
turned on Saturday’s telecast and saw that the clouds that had been following
IndyCar racing had literally appeared above the track, I could only shake my
head.
Fortunately,
it was only a fairly brief shower, and the revived Milwaukee race had a nice
showing – decent crowd and decent race. Too bad the last portion was booted in
favor of a Nationwide race by ABC, but unfortunately that’s where the series is
in the racing world right now in terms of viewers and interest.
A few
thoughts:
Great
job by Ryan Hunter-Reay and James Hinchcliffe to secure a 1-3 finish for
Michael Andretti. But why was Marco Andretti so far off the pace?
What’s
happened to Team Penske’s oval program? Outside of Ryan Briscoe winning the
pole at Indianapolis, it’s been pretty disappointing.
I’m
still perplexed by the Scott Dixon penalty. Isn’t screwing up a start – which in
my opinion is what Dixon did on the aborted restart – a penalty? If not, why
not? And while I appreciate Beaux Barfield doing a post-race mea culpa, that’s
a call you have to get right. The officiating crew presumably has all the
camera angles and replays to make an informed decision. How does this work? Is
someone monitoring the race in real time while someone else looks at footage to
determine if a penalty is warranted? I realize that IndyCar can’t call a timeout
like in an NFL game, but I would think there are better ways to manage
situations like this.
Also,
having Marty Reid and Scott Goodyear (or whoever is announcing) just guess at
what the penalty might be leaves the audience more confused. Maybe IndyCar
could take a page from Fox and have some sort of Mike Pereira type explain what’s
going on.
Not
sure if anyone has brought this up, but what about a second Milwaukee race this
year to fill the hole in the schedule? That track used to have two races – one in
June and one in August.
Photo credit: Shawn Gritzmacher / Indianapolis Motor Speedway
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