I had a very good couple of conversations with this man in Cleveland throughout the weekend. He was there with his son, was from the Ohio area, was a big Paul Tracy Fan (his son was a DaMatta fan) and basically enjoyed open-wheel racing. All forms of it.
I know there are many people like him out there, but I don’t often meet people who are completely on the fence, enjoy both the IRL and Champ Cars and try to attend one or two of each every year.
I know I am going to be chastised for this, but it was refreshing to see. We spoke at different times, I saw him at the Fan Forum, I saw him in the paddock and just following the race and every time we spoke of what was going on at that time and the state of open-wheel racing in general. Now, on any given race weekend, I have at least a handful of conversations with fans about the condition of open-wheel racing and unification. It’s a given, and I enjoy talking about it. And of course, most curse the IRL, Tony and to a certain degree Champ Car for, among other things, lack of promotion, lack of sponsors, the usual suspects. But with this gentleman (whom I regret not actually knowing his name) though we covered the usual suspect, it was about racing, it was about DaMatta versus Tracy, it was about Bourdais’ lackluster start of the season, it was about the IRL crashfest race in Richmond on Saturday night.

My point is that it was neat to meet someone who just loves racing, plain and simple. He was in Cleveland with his son to watch the Cleveland GP, he was heading to Michigan in a couple of weeks to watch the Michigan 400 and hoped he could squeeze in another Champ Car race this summer. The thing I noted most from our conversations was when he said “I like two series, I get to enjoy twice as many races”. That struck me as one of the simplest, yet most profound thing ever said about the state of open-wheel racing in America. He’s absolutely correct, two series means some 30 races in a year. And for a fan of open-wheel racing, that’s a heck of a lot of racing to enjoy in a year!

Hey, if anybody wants to publish their racing story on this blog, by all means drop me an email and we'll work something out. At the end of the day I created this blog to share my experiences at the events, so if you want to share yours, let me know!