By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

It feels surreal: I’m watching the Indy 500 on ESPN in the press room at Charlotte Motor Speedway, while right outside the window, forty-three NASCAR teams are prepping for their own biggest race, which they’ll be running in just a few hours. The Sunday before Memorial Day is always a motorsports marathon, but there’s plenty of other stuff going on today too. Thank you dear sweet baby Jesus for the DVR!

What are you doing motorsports-wise today: Watching the Indy 500, watching the Coca-Cola 600, recording one or both to watch later, or ignoring the whole thing?

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By Rob Einaudi

Editor-in-Chief

Bit of a shocker, huh? More pics at Camaro5

I had a blast at the Indy 500, but getting pics of the actual race was practically impossible. The credentials departments at most tracks seem to dismiss anyone who writes for anything internet-based, and to be honest, I didn’t have a camera decent enough to capture the cars in motion. After all, 220 miles an hour is pretty quick! But I did manage to get shots of virtually everything in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame. Since I’m a total geek, I also took pictures of the signs which explain the details of all the cars on display. What can I say? I read everything. Head over to the events section and check them out, and don’t miss the shots I took while walking the garages before the Indy Lights Freedom 100. What I wouldn’t give to get behind the wheel of one of those babies! Enjoy!

This clip of Danica Patrick getting wrecked by Ryan Briscoe is in Spanish, and it’s not the best—€”read: really crappy—€”quality, but it does have the several different angels of the wreck. There’s also some good footage of her marching toward his pits. I still think it was Briscoe’s fault. What’s your opinion?

Most of the time, the driver that takes the pole doesn’t wind up taking the checkered. But today, Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon proved that "most of the time" doesn’t mean "all of the time." The New Zealand driver yielded his first place position several times during the 92nd running of the Indy 500, but ultimately, it was his day. A disastrous pit stop and handling issues kept teammate—and 2005 Indy winner—Dan Wheldom out of contention, and Dixon was able to hold off inspired challenges from Marco Andretti and Tony Kannan to take home the Borg-Warner trophy.

Photo courtesy Indianapolis Star

All day, Danica Patrick was reporting that her car was slow, but she still managed to keep it in the top ten for most of the race—until a collision with Ryan Briscoe in the pits ended her chances for victory on lap 170. Once out of her crippled car, she marched straight toward Briscoe’s pit, but was stopped by security before getting near the rival driver. As someone who wanted to see her win, I’m just sorry I didn’t have a chance to lean over the wall and hand her a 3/4 torque wrench so she could give him a couple of payback bruises. She didn’t have anywhere to go when Briscoe got loose after completing his stop, and she had every right to confront him. And those that call her too emotional? Please. Racing has seen more than a few champions reduced to tears, and from what I saw, she had every right to be pissed. Better luck next year Danica, I’ll be pulling for you!

Photo courtesy Associated Press

Marty Roth was the slowest driver on the grid for this year’s 500, and he probably wouldn’t have even gotten the opportunity to race if Mario Dominguez hadn’t crashed during qualifying. But his luck ran out on lap 133, when he went wide into turn four and wound up hitting the wall. Check out this clip of his mangled car being brought back to the barn.

This clip is about as far from broadcast-quality video as you can get, but I think that’s what makes it so cool. When you watch the race on the tube, it’s impossible to grasp how incredibly fast the cars are moving, because there are fancy cameras—which probably cost more than a new BMW—constantly tracking them. But chalk one up for my trusty little $200 Casio, as it manged to capture exactly how it looks when the cars come ripping past with the hammer down. Enjoy.

When I went to the Indy Hall of Fame yesterday, my camera battery died while I was only halfway through, so I went back early this morning to get shots of the cars I missed. I’ll get all my pics posted when I get back to CarDomain World Headquarters on Tuesday—sometimes even the wicked get to rest—but I thought this turbine-powered Indy car warranted it’s own blog post. With legendary driver Parnelli Jones behind the wheel, the STP Studebaker lead for 171 laps in the 1967 500, but a spun bearing in the gearbox caused it to lose steam just four laps from the checked. It was the first and last time a turbine-powered car completed in the race, as they were banned the following year. Two more pics after the jump.

Continue reading "Turbine-Powered Indy Car!" »

Unlike Formula 1, where teams construct their cars from the ground up, Indy Cars are all built on Dallara chassis and powered by 650 horsepower Honda V8s. Unsurprisingly, they also all run the same rubber,  Firestone Firehawks. The company actually mounts tires for all the teams, and with 33 cars competing, that means a lot of work for the guys below, who were rocking and rolling as I snapped this pic. According to James—he’s the dude on the right—the teams don’t mark the rims, but after a month of practices, the guys in the garage get to know who all the wheels belong to. "It’s little stuff, like what color and brand they are, and some of the crews clean them before they give them to us, and some of them don’t," he said. Given how important wheels and tires are to a team, I’d think there would be a more organized system to identify them, but what do I know?