With a busy racing weekend in store, the southern circus that is NASCAR rolled into my adopted hometown of Milwaukee this weekend. Not the Sprint Cup Series mind you, but the junior-league Nationwide and Craftsman Trucks were in town.
It's been years since I have attended one of these such races and as a primarily road-racing and open-wheel fan, there was a wealth of culture shock to be embraced. Friday I paid visit to the racing trucks event.
Like the occasional rip on Texas, attending a NASCAR race is like "goin' to a whole other country."
I must say I was getting a bit comfortable going to IndyCar events with my media credential so having to show up at the track, search for a parking space and pay for tickets out of my own pocket was not much fun. The difference in attending races as a younger kid was that my dad took care of both said items.
The fanbase is completely different, as could be expected. The middle-class, hard-working, beer-drinking, mostly accented people comprise the "group of folks" there. Seated right behind me was a fan club rooting for Erik Darnell, who took liberty with NASCAR's decision to not throw a yellow flag at one point when a slower truck was on the racing line and out of fuel. A rash of four-letter words could be heard at any level in the particular grandstand.
To boot, with over 120 laps completed (these Trucks are some six seconds a lap slower than IndyCars), the race took longer and a little over two hours into the experience, lightning strikes and some drizzles were present around the track. I bolted, as did most of the half-capacity crowd, for the exits. A forty-minute delay later and the race resumed.
It was a good thing that IndyCar easily had more fans than the Trucks at the Milwaukee Mile, and probably as many if not a little more than the Nationwide race on Saturday night. There's still much work to be done though in those ranks and a roundtable meeting of potential manufacturers being held this week is a step in the rebuilding process.
IndyCar, after a week off, resumed at Iowa this past weekend. As usual, both no-hope drivers Marty Roth and Milka Duno crashed in practice, with Roth withdrawing before the race for the third time this season. Duno retired after 26 laps with the politically-correct "handling" issues, slang for being slower than a turtle in racing terms.
With 60 laps to go, fuel-mileage came into play as three drivers stayed out (Dan Wheldon, Hideki Mutoh and Danica) while the rest topped off their tanks. The former two stayed in their 1-2 spots with Danica fading to 6th by the checkers. For all the efforts of ABC/ESPN to promote the heck out of her, she has no top-five finishes this season with the exception of her fortunate first win in Japan.
Elsewhere I got to see an F1 race for a change, as Time Warner Cable's basic lineup doesn't include SPEED. The French GP, broadcast on FOX, featured a Ferrari 1-2 with Felipe Massa ahead thanks to a faulty exhaust pipe that derailed Kimi Raikkonen's race. As usual there was little of entertainment other than a gripping battle for third late in the going between Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen, Trulli eventually prevailing there.
Next week, NASCAR's main series returns to ovals following their one week road course jaunt to Sonoma, while IndyCar takes on its shortest track at the three-quarter mile Richmond bullring. Until then, cheers.
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