LB baby!

Well, I just flew back home and I am settling back, still reeling from an incredible few days in Long Beach. The event was fantastic, working with Bruce, Terry, Rich and Dave was fun and informative as always and all three races were pretty darn good.

I managed to do some interviews with our broadcast crew and I hope to have those on the website as soon as possible. Naturally, I also gathered content for Overheard at the track and look forward to dumping some voices over the clips. Look for different Overheards to periodically appear in the next few weeks. I want to thank Jill and the Kelly who volunteered their time to be my cameraperson when I needed to do the interviews. I couldn’t have done it without them! I hope you enjoy them! I also hurried at the end of the race to try and capture some Podium celebration. But, like most of the stuff I will try and do this year, I tried to capture the celebration from different angles and such. Its probably a little wobbly and shacky at times, but I bet you won’t get that kind of footage anywhere else! Of course, being the bird brain that I am, I left my laptop cord at the hotel and my battery is dead. So it may be a couple more days before I get the chance to send out the clips. I know, bird brain!

However, I did take 60 odd pictures and I can’t wait to share some of them with you. What I need to do is get something like Yahoo photobook or whatever the heck its called so I can post them all up on that page, instead of here, where the page would then literally become 7 miles long.

Alright, let’s talk racing. First of all…Danica Who? The Toyota Atlantics race was by far the best Atlantics race I have ever seen live. Calling it was almost too easy as the action spoke for itself. What a freakin finish and what great battles all race long! In her Atlantic debut, Miss Katherine Legge demonstrated how gusty she is (ask Fernando Rees) and just how good she is. This is one of the rare instances that I’m glad the race wasn’t broadcast live, as I so look forward to watching it again on Speed in the near future. Seriously, if you get a chance, don’t miss it. If this is the start of things to come from this crop of new drivers participating, then the Atlantics should be something else this year!! Think there’s no passing on account of the cars being ‘specs’? tell that to Charles Swolsman who started last (he failed inspection after getting Pole) and finished on the podium. It was one of those drives that you wish there was a single camera following him the entire race. For a debut, it was pretty darn special. But of course, Katherine Legg is the driver everybody is talking about, as they should. I mean no disrespect to Danica Patrick and her driving abilities. But Rahal and the IRL can market her all they want, but the bottom line is that there is a NEW female racing phenom in America and her name is Katherine Legge!

Absolute heartbreaker to Rocky Moran Jr. he was not only running near the top, he occupied that spot for some time! The two-time Atlantic champion is running in the C2 category this year. Basically he’s still running a Swift 014 chassis, but his engine specification aren’t up to the same standards as the C1 and his car has about 35 extra pounds. And he was still in the top three for most of the race!! It’s a shame the way things turned out for him, but he’ll be back with a vengeance and will make the newly expanded C2 category very exciting.

Tracy breaking a qualifying record??? Didn’t those cars back in 2000 have something like 27000 horsepower??? That record wasn’t supposed to be broken for quite some time. But, the Cosworth, the Bridgestones, the team and Tracy came through and put down a hell of a lap.

Great race! Great on-track product. No question about it. Again, pretty darn easy to announce since they put on such a great race. Good battles all race long. A particularly good one between Tagliani and Glock who went back and forth for most of the race. Bourdais benefiting from that yellow on his pitstop, which allowed him to stay on pace. Nevertheless, he drove the H*** out of that car. He is really something special and worth the admission price alone.

I like the rules as they are. I like the elimination of the pit windows. It made those green flag pitstops really exciting. Huge Props to the new crop of drivers who were able to pull off some quick pitstops, despite it being their first ever real pitstops under race conditions.

All in all, a hugely successful grand prix as everybody went home happy (the fans that is). Some teams still have some work to do to get up to speed, but the good news is that it’s a matter of when and not IF.

If you were at the event, you probably heard the fact that you could email us in the booth with your comments and questions, which we would answer on air. I don’t know how many comments we had that stated something like “I’ve been coming here for so many years and if its not Champ Car next year, I won’t be back in 06”. I really wanted to announce those on the air, but I decided to use some discretion out of respect. But man, it felt good to read those comments!

I’ll blog some more stories of my weekend throughout the next few days.

Champ Car Baby! Champ Car for Life!