Re: Another woman driver in IRL Milka Duno is an embarrassment to women racers. Danica's massively overrated, but she is a real IRL driver and would be in that field whether she was a woman or not (though probably not for big, big teams). Likewise Sarah Fisher. Duno, however, is going to get somebody killed if she stays on the track long enough.
Re: Another woman driver in IRL It is just so bizarre to me that with little to no open-wheel experience she would be allowed to get on to the track. Wouldn't she have to go through some certification process? Could they actually be allowing this just because she is somewhat of a good looking woman and they are looking for more exposure? If that's the case the IRL has a huge problem and will loose whatever respect they have.
Re: Another woman driver in IRL The IRL had respect? From who? Duno is there because her husband is high up in CITGO and is loaded. She is little more than a mediocre club racer. Her car finished 2nd in the Daytona 24, but the reality is she drove for 45 minutes of the race and put the car two laps down. She was running in the wet and she was literally 10 seconds off the pace.
Re: Another woman driver in IRL You just nailed the answer, by the way. It has nothing to do with gender or the like. She's in there because she brings a big name sponsor (Citgo) with her.
More on Milka Duno Here's a write up on the dangers of putting Duno straight into the IRL. http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/columns/story?seriesId=1&columnist=oreovicz_john&id=2818104
IRL's Grand Prix of St. Petersburg The IRL will be in St. Petersburg tomorrow, race time 2:30pm Eastern on ESPN. C'mon Danica, do something.
Re: IRL's Grand Prix of St. Petersburg That was great when Matsuura dropped the F bomb right on live TV but then weak how the announcer a couple of minutes later apologized for the inappropriate language. C'mon, just let it go, have some balls. Overall the race wasn't bad. Good showing for the two women drivers. The quality of ESPN's production still ticked me off on several occasions. On more than one occasion the announcer would say "Let's ride along with....." when they went to an onboard camera view but as soon as he would say that they would switch to another camera. Damn, letting us go around for one complete lap with the onboard camera is just too much to ask. Also, the damn announcers won't shut up for one minute so we can hear the roar of the engines, it's just constant chatter with them. Well, next week we get our first look at Champ Car and I'll be able to do some comparing.
Re: Another woman driver in IRL If she is given a race license, it does have something to do with her gender - because she's not qualified.
Champ Car schedule Here's a good article from ESPN describing the difficulties Champ Car may have this year due to a rather odd schedule. http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/columns/story?seriesId=5&columnist=oreovicz_john&id=2821710
Champ Car-Las Vegas-Friday practice A few pics from Friday practice. (Paul Tracy turned the fastest lap.) Paul Tracy (holy crap! looks like rally racing)
Champ Car-Las Vegas-Friday practice Looks like the Las Vegas street circuit has some interesting back-drops.
Re: Champ Car-Las Vegas-Friday practice Vegas is actually a very good track. The drivers liked it a lot - very wide, some different types of corners (including a very fast right handed sweeper leading onto the pit straight) and some elevation changes. Not at all a bad track. The only thing was that chicane in front of the pit entry was comical. They literally just stuck some kerbs in the middle of the road with no lines or markers indicating where it was. And those kerbs caused the cars to bounce all over the place and become airborne. That needs to be fixed for next year.
Champ Car Las Vegas Yeh, not a bad race at all. Vegas had it quirks that they need to work out but overall that was a fantastic street circuit. Here's ESPN's write up. http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/columns/story?seriesId=5&columnist=oreovicz_john&id=2830743 One note, NBC's coverage pretty much sucked! I wanted to see if they did a better job than ESPN did with the first two IRL races but they didn't. They didn't give us hardly any onboard camera views and when they did their stupid on-screen graphics covered up most of the screen so you couldn't even see the track in front of the car. And we also suffered from too much chatter by the announcers. Let us hear the cars without constant comments about whatever they can think of. And too many pit reporters, I think they had more than what were working the IRL races which were too many already.
Re: Champ Car Las Vegas I was down in Vega$ during this race, but only caught a glimpse of the action while going to our hotel (Golden Nugget). Man those things were LOUD!!! The morning after, there was chatter in the city over whether or not the race was actually a success. And FWIW, I do believe that the estimated crowd of 40K came from one of the race organizers and not from an unbiased source....like say law enforcement. While walking around downtown, it didn't seem that packed during the race. Of course we were far away from the grandstands. I do know that there was not a line at a couple of the food & beer stands while the race was still going on. The hotel we stayed at housed at least a couple of the teams so it was kinda cool to see them roaming around the hotel afterwards.
Champ Car - Long Beach Long Beach, this Sunday, NBC 4 pm Eastern. Tecate girls (I'm liking the Panoz DP01.)
Re: Another woman driver in IRL So in other words, she's the female version of Hiro Matsushita (Panasonic heir) or Andrea de Cesaris, aka 'Andrea de Crasheris' (family owns Marlboro distribution in Italy). This is one of the problems with motorsports - sponsor $$$ trumps talent. A rich guy (or woman) will almost always get the drive over the fast guy unless the team can afford both. That said, just because your career was greatly advanced because you're bankrolled by a rich father doesn't necessarily mean you suck (see: "Senna da Silva, Ayrton").
Champ Car - Long Beach Wow, that was a pretty good race. Bourdais ran away with it but there was some good battles for 3rd and 4th place that came down to the last lap. I wonder if Oriol Servia may have just won himself a permanent seat with Forsythe since reports say that Mario Dominguez changed clothes after his accident and just left the track, didn't even stick around to cheer on his temporary team mate. NBC's coverage still kind of sucked. Next week we will see how ESPN does.
Bad news for me, the CCWS moved from Eurosport freeview to Eurosport 2 which you have to suscribe to...I can't watch races live anymore ; I'll have to DL torrents... Let's hope it's just temporary...
Re: Another woman driver in IRL de Cesaris was a World Karting Champion, finished 2nd in British F3, raced in F2 with Ron Dennis's Project 4 team, and despite crashing a lot, took pole position in a Formula 1 race at 23 years old. Matsushita won the Formula Atlantic series in 1989 with the largest margin of points in series history. Both these guys have so much more on their CV than Milka Duno it's silly. She hasn't won anything above Ferrari Challenge races and has never raced in ANY open-wheel series with any success whatsoever. She raced in the Nissan Pro Series in 2003, which offers a very generous points structure (1-10). Only 2 out of the 28 drivers failed to score points during the season. Guess who was one of them?
Milka Duno This is insane. Read this ESPN article about Duno's practice sessions. http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/news/story?seriesId=1&id=2836727 Here's a good quote from Duno. "You're going over 200 all the time. When you feel the car starting to slide a little bit, not to have nerves but to control the situation -- that's something very tough." Oh really, ya' think? I hope she doesn't injure herself or others too badly.
Re: Another woman driver in IRL And was a danger to himself and others on the F1 circuit for how many years? When he was at McLaren his mechanics sometimes refused to fix his car because they knew he'd only go out and wreck it again. He also holds the record for F1 starts without a victory (208). Oh, and that pole he won at Long Beach? Guess how he finished that race? He... wait for it.... crashed out. OK, that was a trick question. And was a danger to himself and others on the CART circuit for how many years? I mean the guy was so slow it was painful to watch. His best ever result was a 6th at the Michigan 500 in 1994 - a year in which he DNS'd three times for the reason "Too Slow". I'm not saying Duno is great. I'm just saying that she's not the first racer to get by on money more than talent. I'm also not surprised that a guy with big enough bucks to pay his own way in CART and F1 is successful in the lower levels, either. But when Andrea and Hiro had to race against guys who made it to the top on talent as much as on daddy's money, they were shown to be rather mediocre. No doubt Duno will too, but that's racing for ya. Or as Sam Moses put it...
Heads up! Saturday the IRL will be in Japan, 3 pm Eastern on ESPN. Sunday Champ Car will be in Houston, 3 pm Eastern on ESPN also.