I generally prefer to watch races where an independent has a chance — as late as the Seventies, you could still build a car in your own shop, take it to Indy, and have a chance of making the race without multimillion-dollar sponsorships and marketing plans. Eighty or ninety cars would show up back then, too… and now, they’re having trouble getting a full field of 33. The rules left room for innovation, too — you could always count on Mickey Thompson or the Granatelli brothers or someone showing up with something weird, now the cars are pretty much all clones.

Bill France the elder is supposed to have said that the ideal field for a Cup race was “five cars that can win, and the rest for them to run through” — but, even back in the old days, NASCAR was notorious for throwing questionable cautions if the race got to be a runaway.

And, on another topic — Cooz, Packard may not have made pianos, but Studebaker made watches. You could look it up… they were sold under another name, but the same Studebaker family owned the factory.

Another thing is, it really does look very cool. The cars are beautiful, and their high-revving engines have a satisfying, powerful sounding scream. And the standing starts are exquisite; and the rareness of having a safety car on the track is neat. If a racer is 1/2 second a lap quicker than another, then the lead he builds up generally doesn’t get taken away by a full-course NASCAR-style “debris” caution…NASCAR makes sure to keep the cars in a pack and concentrates on strengthening the walls (as Dale Earnhardt shrewdly observed), rather than letting the better cars leave the lesser ones in the dust.

The truth, in my estimation, is that a person can get sucked into being a fan of almost anything for whatver reason — and then once there’s a connection (you develop favorites, or anti-favorites, or whatever), you’re locked in.

By rights, F1 should have imploded as badly as American open-wheel did, by now.…and they keep dancing on the edge of the cliff. They dumped their US and Canadian race dates — thus becoming totally absent from their biggest sponsors’ largest market in the world — North America; they almost had an American style split this summer, they dangled a potnetially fan-pleasing return of Schuey (which ain’t happening), and they seem to be ready to EXCLUDE the Renault team and its handsome former World Champion Fernando Alonso from racing in his home country’s race in 10 days!! They seem to go out of their way to court financial disaster!

Not for nothing, I USED to be a baseball fan, and fell away from it; and I used to be an American open-wheel fan, and fell away from it…so who knows?

Ah, Route 19 on the Suncoast, my MIL lives in Palm Harbor, just north of Dunedin. Route 19 is always an adventure and we got a rental car totaled by a completely inattentive 40-something driver with a suspended license near the Dunedin-Palm Harbor border. She got out of the car and sat on the pavement with her head in her hands, she wouldn’t talk to us and barely spoke to the police. Luckily, we walked away, more or less, although it didn’t do my MIL any good.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/motorsport/formula_one/8186319.stm

an excerpt:

Seven-time Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher has abandoned his comeback with Ferrari because of a neck injury.

Too bad on the one hand; and a relief, on the other

Well, if I hadn’t been smitten with Michael Schumacher in 1994, I guess I’d agree with these unkind assessments of him! But back at that time, Schuey was driving a Benetton car (quite beautiful, with its “united colors of Benetton” livery!) with a customer Ford engine, and Ayrton Senna was killed in a Williams with the almighty Renault engine — I think 3 or 4 races into the season (at Imola, Italy). From that time forward to the end of the year, it seemed like the FIA was working overtime to stop Schuey from winning the World Championship. They banned him from races for passing a car on the installation lap (BEFORE the race began!), and for wearing out the skid plate beneath the car (!!), and in one race he lost everything but 3rd gear and still finished in the points…and he won the World Championship versus Damon Hill.…who I SHOULD have liked, since he manfully took over for the departed Senna, in a potentially unsafe car, and who nearly won the championship. That MIGHT have been the year Schuey smacked into Hill in the last race, taking each other out, and locking in the championship — or maybe not.…but the deal was sealed, and I was a Schuey fan then and thence forward, forever.

Then, Benetton switched from the Ford power to the almighty Renault, and Schuey made it look easy in 1995.…and meanwhile Ferrari looked comically bad, with Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger haplessly scoring few points and generally being non-factors.…and then Schuey went to Ferrari in 1996, and raised the level over there, ’til people ultimately said “well yes, Schuey wins, but he’s always in the best car” — ignoring the fact that Schumacher himself raises the game of whatever team he’s on, and improves the performance of whatever car he’s in, until the team and the car become “the best”.

Anyway — he’s going to run a few more races, and I think he’ll get a win or two — and light a fire beneath Kimi Raikkonen (who I think is the most over-paid guy in racing!), and he’ll leave things better than he found them, as always.

As for folks who DON’T like Schuey — I get it; And — it’s all in fun, really — at least from the cheap seats! You know, speaking ‘cheap seats’, when Formula One would come to Indianapolis, I always went to the Saturday practice/qualifying…lots and lots of racey cars (and racey other things!) to see, and for cheap! And — I’ve been in marvelously funny conversations with other fans in the stands time and again. One older fellow — who had flown in from California with a buddy while their wives shopped in Chicago — saw my Schuey shirt and started a mock-serious harrangue about how terrible Schumacher was. Somehwere in there, he mentioned that Schuey would have been a death-camp guard for the Nazis, if he had been born 50 years sooner! — and I said ‘No, no — he’d have been an ace pilot in the Luftwaffe’ — and the guy didn’t miss a beat, immediately retorting “and he’d be strafing civilians every chance he got”!! Had to laugh — they guy just didn’t like Schuey!

I took the train from LA to Flagstaff once and yes, you can see Vegas glowing for many miles before you get there. Glowing doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s like it’s daylight in Vegas and midnight fifty miles out.