Carlos Munoz suits up. It’s quite a shame Munoz only has a ride for the 500, he’s way too talented to be doing one race a year.
It was interesting to see how well the part-timers did at Indy this year. In the top 9 there were three! Ed Carpenter (only does the oval races in IndyCar) snatched the pole. Helio Castroneves (running IMSA for Penske-Acura) and Danica Patrick (hasn’t been in IndyCar since 2011 and has only done one race in 2018) both made it into the 3rd row too. During the race, the part-timers even played spoiler to the series leaders and at the end the race could have been won by any of three part-time drivers!
David Hobbs was at the memorabilia show signing his new book Hobbo: Motor Racer, Motor Mouth. I picked up a copy for myself and had a nice chat with Mr Hobbs. He had an interesting theory about ESPN’s F1 coverage and commercials: unlike a number of broadcasters, ESPN is not paying a cent for F1. ESPN decided to add commercials so they could milk F1 as much as possible and of course did a god awful job of it. After the extremely negative feedback from the fans, Hobbo thinks Liberty Media sat ESPN down and told them to run the races commercial free or else.
Say what you want about Danica Patrick, but she’s still as popular as ever. She’s had a rough time in NASCAR and she got really bitter in her last few years there. At Indy, she was having fun again and that was refreshing to see.
It’s amazing how much of a difference a year can make. In 2016, only a single Penske car (Will Power) started in the top 9. In 2017, all four Penske cars started in the Fast 9 and damn near locked out the front row. My guess was a Penske was going to win this year’s 500.
Poor Ed Carpenter. This was his strongest year at Indy, but it still wasn’t good enough. The last of the USAC to IndyCar specialists, when he retires a unique chapter of history will quietly close for good.
I am surprised more of a stink wasn’t made about the James Davidson/Takuma Sato incident. Davidson’s car was clearly in trouble. Some portion of blame does lay on Davidson and his Foyt/Byrd Racing team for not pulling over when their car was dangerously slow. But a big portion of blame needs to lay at IndyCar for not blag flagging the car earlier. Sanctioning bodies are there to keep things safe and leaving a car out that’s 20 mph slower than the field is definitely not safe. Considering what happened to Scott Dixon a year ago, you’d think IndyCar would be a bit more mindful about this!
