Barber Test This Weekend
By Andrew Cutler
March 20 2009
The drivers of the IndyCar & Firestone Indy Lights series - well, most of them, anyway - will take to Barber Motorsports Park road course over the next three days in the final pre-season tune-up. The 16 turn, 2.38 mile road course, with it's rolling hills and unique animal sculptures (see picture) lies just East of the city of Birmingham AL.
Saturday will be reserved for the Indy Lights squads, with sessions scheduled for 9am-noon & 1pm-5pm ET. Sunday & Monday are for the IndyCar teams, with 9am-11am & noon-5pm on Sunday & 9am-noon & 1pm-5pm on Monday being their times. As far as I know right now, all sessions will be carried live via video streaming on the IndyCar website, indycar.com.
Four IndyCar squads will not be at Barber this weekend, opting instead to conduct private tests at another date at other tracks - something that is allowed, so long as they don't exceed the IRL-mandated limit on total testing miles/hours in a season. AJ Foyt Enterprises (driver: Vitor Meria) has already run their session earlier this month at a track closer to their home base of Houston TX.
HVM racing, which has EJ Viso signed to one car & is working on signing Ryan Hunter-Reay to a second, did not feel that this weekend was a good time for them to be testing. Conquest Racing, which has not yet announced ANY drivers (it is generally expected that Jamie Camara & Alex Tagliani will be resigned soon) also wanted to concentrate on their driver/sponsor negotiations.
IndyCar newcommer Team 3G, with rookie driver Stanton Barrett, is also missing from the participant list. I have not been able to find any statement from them as to why they will not attend the test.