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This first words in this book come from the pen of Mario Andretti: "Paul Newman was one of us." More »
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As mentioned yesterday, Champ Car has announced the schedule for its 2008 season, including a return to Portland International Raceway on July 27, 2008. Unfortunately, that's also the same weekend as the AMA Toyota Motocross Championship at Washougal Motocross Park on the other side of town. Previous Champ Car races in Portland have seen diminishing crowds, so we're not sure of the wisdom of programming an event on that weekend. We're not sure how much crossover there is among the MX and Champ Car crowds, but we'd try and book a hotel yesterday if we were planning to go to either event. [The Columbian] More »
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Open-wheel racing fans rejoice! The 2008 Champ Car schedules are out, and include a new European track. The Atlantic Series will include seven races in the US, three in Canada as part of the Canadian Triple Crown and one in Mexico. The Atlantic series kicks off on April 20th in Long Beach and April 27 in Houston. The Champ Car World Series sees the addition of Jerez, Spain and the track originally built to host the 1986 Spanish Formula One Grand Prix. Full release and schedule after the jump... More »
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The race season is winding down and the auto show season is ramping up. But there's still plenty of exciting action on the track this weekend and we've got it all, from Formula 1 to the ZR1 Vettegasm at ALMS below the jump. More »
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Jalopnik's Las Vegas local, Curtis Walker reports on race day at the Las Vegas Grand Prix this past weekend. He spent Friday braving the rainy season and making faces at TV's Frankie Muniz, who debuted in Champ Car Atlantic. On Sunday he braved the desert sun to catch the KO of Champ Car favorite Sebastien Bourdais and more than six cars in the Champ Car Atlantic field. Check out some of the entries we copied from Curtis's notebook, which arrived at Jalopnik Central covered in dust, oil and dried margarita mix. At least we hope it was dried margarita mix. More »
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We sent Jalopnik's resident desert dweller and Las Vegas go-to guy, Curtis Walker, to crash the Las Vegas Grand Prix this weekend. He spent Friday braving the rainy season and dodging TV's Frankie Muniz, who's making his debut in Champ Car Atlantic on Sunday. He also watched as Champ Car's Sebastien Bourdais missed pole position, and was reminded of the video game Pole Position by some historic open-wheel race cars. Check out some scratches copied directly from Curtis's notebook, along with some trackside stills. Fear not, he's ok. More »
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Honestly, if you were 21 and had millions of dollars and nothing better to do you'd propose to your 27 year-old hairdresser girlfriend and start racing cars, too. Frankie Muniz, star of Malcolm in the Middle, has graduated from the Formula BMW USA series to the Champ Car Atlantic Series and will be racing for Jensen MotorSport at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. Apparently, he's sporting a mohawk in order to "be taken seriously as a member of the Jensen MotorSport team." Which is completely logical... as everyone knows, Fangio, Moss and Gurney all wore mohawks as young drivers. – Matt Hardigree More »
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Being men of a certain age who never quite got around to giving up being boys, Los Jalopniks are big fans of slot car racing. So excuse us for being a little geeked that we just found out that in July of this year, Tomy-owned AFX will launch a line of HO-scale slot cars resembling the current crop of Champ Cars. The cars will drop this summer, which gives us some time to get to work building our scale model of Downtown Long Beach. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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The Champ Car race in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec hasn't been doing so well, with attendance at the previous Montreal race dropping to around 110,000, nearly a third of a similar F1 weekend. So what are those nutty Canadians doing to make the series more interesting? Adding Cirque Du Soleil (and moving it to the resort town of Mont-Tremblant outside of Montreal). For three days the Cirque performers will be making racing fans uncomfortable with their brightly painted bodies and strange body contortions. The only plus side to this is the possibility of someone getting video of Paul Tracy in a bright yellow unitard juggling in some guy's lap. – Matt Hardigree More »
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Just like that, in a slash of the accountant's broadpen, Ford has withdrawn its sponsorship of the Champ Car World Series, the open-wheel racing series once known as CART. Ford Racing Technology head, Dan Davis, said the company's sponsorship, "does not align with our current business objectives." Those objectives, we'd imagine, include clawing back toward profitability. So what will happen to the Champ? A merge with Indy or some other, less high-profile, fate? You call it, we listen. – Mike Spinelli More »
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We have to say, we can't not back Alex Zanardi, who lost his legs five years ago in a CART wreck with fellow Alex — and fellow vowel-ending-surnamed racing driver — Tagliani. For the first time since his stint with Williams in '99, Zanardi got back into a Formula One car, trading his normal size-9 prosthetic feet for a pair of 4 1/2s (how rad is being able to change your shoe size on a whim?) and whipped four laps around the Valencia circuit. That guy must have more chest hair than Donkey Kong. R k. [Thanks to Scott for the tip.] – Davey G. Johnson More »
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We've always loved Lola. But who wouldn't love a green-haired, tatted-up Oregon stripper (full nudity + alcohol) who pole-danced to Iron Maiden and Slayer, whose real love was erotic performance art? Oh wait, sorry. Cars, right. Eric Broadley's brainchild bore fruit on the American open-wheel circuit as early as 1966, with Graham Hill's win at Indy. Sadly, that association is about to end, with the adoption of Panoz chassis for the entire Champ Car series next season. But mostly, we're posting this just to have an excuse to run a picture of a T70. We mean, if you were us, wouldn't you? – Davey G. Johnson More »
]]> http://jalopnik.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=214904&view=rss&microfeed=true On Monday, our buddy Steve told us to keep an eye out for video of Champ Car racer Katherine Legge' off-the-wall crash this past weekend. Of course, we were all busy navigating various bits of the inter-continental aviation industry. Thankfully, Autoblog located the clip and gave us a heads' up. Yeah, Steve, she sure did hit that wall. But she seems ok in this interview video. Still, maybe someone should keep her from falling asleep for a few days, just in case. More »
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The man only known by the moniker of MyNameIsIRL steps up and makes a compelling argument as to why the IRL and Champ Car shouldn't merge. He posits that a merger would tilt the series in favor of Cosworth (which Champ Car maven Kevin Kalkhoven controls), that Champ Car fans won't watch oval races anyway, (which is likely true, besides the Indy 500), and that Americans prefer watching three-wide oval action. More »
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Faithful tipster Scott sent over this bit from ESPN regarding Champ Car-driver Cristiano da Matta's collision with a deer during a practice session at Elkhart Lake. Cristiano is currently hospitalized in critical condition, in a medically-induced coma, due to a subdural hematoma. In layman's terms, it means that the accident resulted in a burst blood vessel on the surface of his brain. Stefan Johannson — who courteously dropped off the Bullrun so's we could snake his room at the W Hotel in San Diego — also had a run-in with a deer back in '87 while racing F1 for McLaren in Austria. He comments, "I got a hell of a fright, I can tell you. And the thing is that the deer was apparently running around in the woods and the field for some time but no one thought to have practice stopped." More »
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Pretty as they are, deer can be pretty damn stupid, and it didn't even require headlights for Champ Car driver Cristiano da Matta to catch one with his car at speed when it wandered onto the track at Road America. Knocked unconscious by the collision, da Matta was airlifted to Theda Clark Memorial Hospital in Neenah, WI. We currently have no word on the 2002 season champ's condition, but we wish him the best and a speedy recovery. [Thanks to Scott for the tip.] More »
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Go ahead. Call Richard Petty a relic. Call him back-asswards on women's issues. Fair game, of course. But never let it be said that the man doesn't have personality. The kids over at thefirehouse.biz, Chrysler's media-only blog, posted a podcast featuring some short interviews with NASCAR drivers past and present, and while Petty was diplomatic, at least he was instructive and human, explaining the post-Second-War origins of motorsports in general. On the other hand, Kurt Busch, Jeremy Mayfield and Casey Kahne were roughly as fascinating as potting soil blended with bleached flour, and honestly, recently-retired Rusty Wallace wasn't much more interesting. More »
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Riley Technologies, based just outside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, is headed south to Mooresville, SC in a bid to gain more NASCAR business. The company, who've built open-wheel racers, sports prototypes and USAC cars and won the Grand Am championship last year, sees fewer and fewer opportunities in Indy and greener pastures in stock car racing. Admittedly, we'd rather live in the South than the Midwest, but somehow, this really bums us out. More »
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Punkey tossed a heads-up on this one, and well, since we're listening to Minor Threat at the moment, we figured now would be an appropriate time to post it. Apparently, open-wheel mucky-mucks Tony George and Kevin Kalkhoven have been spending a bit of time together lately, talking about how much a deal could work. Salient points? Panoz chassis, Honda and Cosworth 2.5 turbo mills, Bridgestone/Firestone tires. We've come to regard Kalkhoven as a pretty savvy operator, and both men are obviously worried about what was once America's premier motorsport. Here's to hoping it happens. But please, keep Gene Simmons out of it. More »
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When Toyota pulled its Champ Car Atlantic Championship sponsorship last year, followed by an announcement that the next iteration of series cars would lose Toyota's 4AGE 1600cc mill in favor of a 2.3-liter Cosworth engine, many speculated that Ford would take over. Well it is; kind of. Today, Mazda announced a three-year marketing deal with the Champ Car Atlantic Championship racing series, which is generally a proving ground for upcoming racers. For the 2006 season, Atlantic cars will be powered by a 300-hp 2.3-liter four-cylinder Mazda-designed MZR engine — also known as the Ford Duratec 23 — prepared by Cosworth Engineering, and mounted in identical Swift 016.a chassis and riding on Yokohama tires. That means the official series name will now be (grab your pencils) "Yokohama Presents the Champ Car Atlantic Championship Powered by Mazda." Now all it needs is some fans. More »
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Everyone's fave blingin' Canuck racing driver reveals more of his plans to take on the southern roundy-round juggernaut; Paul Tracy is headed to Florida for NASCAR testing. With six races in the Cup season before the Champ Car World Series gets underway, tracy plans to try his luck in stock cars early in the year and then run his regular season in the full open-wheel series. He comments, ""I've got a couple of things cooking nothing I can really talk about right now, but we're hopeful we'll have something in place right after Christmas, hopefully to run a couple of races right before my (Champ Car) season starts." More »
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Champ Car bids a tearful adieu to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, saying, "We will continue to research other opportunities for future events in the Las Vegas market that hopefully are a better fit for our business model expectations." But screw all that, because they're replacing the event by coming back Road America! We've never actually driven the famed course at Elkhart Lake, WI, but we did do some funky simulator thingy at SEMA years ago that took you around the track, and well, compared to a 1.5-mile oval, it's kind of a no-brainer, really. More »
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Al Unser, Sr., he of mad Brickyard fame, is cooling his heels in a hospital bed right now as a result of an inflamed pancreas. The 66 year-old Unser checked in on Tuesday due to the condition, which was likely caused by gallstones. Our best to Al and his pancreas. Man, we are so not looking forward to pancreatic and gall-bladder related problems as we get older. Erf. More »
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Lola, whose chassis have dominated the Champ Car field as of late, is a bit perturbed that the series has inked a deal with Panoz to supply cars for the series. The British race car manufacturer has been building Champ Cars since the 1970, but it's not their only meal ticket, as they're the sole supplier to the new A1GP, their LMP2 competes in prototype sports car racing and they're working on a new LMP1 chassis, among other things. More »
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We reported almost two months ago that popular Champ Car driver and proponent of large amounts of ice (and we don't mean Molson Ice) Paul Tracy was testing with Richard Childress Racing for a possible run at NASCAR next season. While the window of opportunity hasn't closed yet and Tracy's still interested, apparently getting down with the Frances has been a little tougher than the Canuck expected. "If you're not down there in front of them all the time, it makes things difficult. I can't get to every (NASCAR) race," he explains, adding, "I do get a lot of respect when I do go out there." If the good ol' boys don't want him, expect to see Tracy back in a Champ Car seat next season. More »
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The cleanser with approximately 800,640,321 uses, Simple Green, is apparently a pretty potent weapon on the track. And a banned substance. According to an unnamed Champ Car mucky-muck, they've tested the substance and found that it extended tire life by around four laps. We don't know what their secret application method is, but maybe some of you chemist-types out there could let us know what the possible reaction between the green and the black is. More »
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Paul Tracy, proponent of bling and one of the most successful and visible open-wheel racers since the CART/IRL schism, spent the early part of this week testing in a Childress car at Michigan International Speedway. Assuming that RCR bosses are happy with his performance, Tracy's set to run in the August 21st GFS Marketplace 400. A Canuck running for the Cup? We're buying stock in the Elsinore Brewery right now. More »
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