Ugly Start, But A Great Finish
By Andrew Cutler
March 14 2010
There for a while, it looked like Murphy's Law was going to be the only winner of the IndyCar season opener at Sao Paulo. After having qualifying postponed until this morning due to the unusually slick surface at the Sambadrome start/finish complex, The race itself didn't make it into the first complex of turns before a very scary multi-car pile-up ensued.
Rookie Takuma Sato, who started from the 10th grid spot, failed to adequately slow up for the first turn. When he finally got hard onto the binders, his car tried to swap ends, hitting Helio Castroneves, which forced the Penske driver into Scott Dixon. As the cars behind this incident checked up, Mario Moraes lost control of his ride and landed on top of Marco Andretti's car. Given the way that Mario's car finally came to rest on Marco's - a bit forward of the air inlet just behind the cockpit - there were a few tense moments until the IRL confirmed that they had indeed heard from young Marco, who said that he was unhurt.
Castroneves and Dixon were both able to get their cars fixed and continue on. After a long yellow flag period to clean that mess up, the drivers got down to business. And then the rains came.
At first the teams ducked into the pits for rain tires and tried to soldier on, but the downpour eventually became so intense that the IRL parked the cars and waited the weather out. After about 30 minutes the skies were clear and the worst of the standing water had been delt with, so the race resumed.
Working with the knowledge that this was now a timed event instead of a set distance race, and trying to guess the optimum time to switch back from rain tiers to slicks made for an exciting second 'half' - really about 26 minutes - of the race. In the end, it was looking like a duel between Ryan Hunter-Reay and Ryan Biscoe, with Will Power resigned to finish third. After RHR pushed Briscoe into 'mirror driving' himself strait into a tire barrier, however, Power surged ahead to challenge the American to a tight duel over the last four laps.
In the end, Power prevailed, with Hunter-Reay dropping to second, and - to the delight of the Brazilian fans - Vitor Meira finishing third after his own battle with fellow countryman Raphael Matos, who was fourth.
So, for it's opening race of the year, the IndyCar Series had two drivers comming back from serious injuries in 2009 (Power & Meira) sandwiching a driver who spent a good deal of the off-season wondering if he was even going to have a ride this year (Hunter-Reay).
Hollywood movie, anyone?
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Too bad Sato demonstrated his wam-bam F1 approach. Hope he wakes up or he'll be out of another series.
session
Apart from the location of the grandstands, I don't understand why they started the race entering a slow chicane rather than on the pit straight with a more reasonable first corner. Granted I'm still trying to figure out why you run a street race in the same town as Interlagos.
Otherwise, the race was pretty good, certainly better than the GP in the morning. I am glad to see that Simona may be closer to Danica in performance than the other female drivers. Speaking of which, could someone tell me why Milka still has a license? As incompetent as Marty Roth was, it's starting to seem like a double standard is in place.
Milka has the CITGO bucks, which DCR needs to keep the doors open. My bet is that once the economy rebounds - hopefully in time for the 2011 season - to the point where better drivers can land sponsorship help, she'll find herself w/o a ride.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2010:03:26:03:58:06 by IndyAndy.