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2019 loves and hates, part 2

Image by Levitt/LAT
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emailBy: Marshall Pruett | January 1, 2020 9:03 AM

LOVE: The Golden Tenderloin

RACER’s Robin Miller was both celebrated and embarrassed in May as the old crank was recognized for his 50 years of service to IndyCar racing and the Indy 500 with the aptly-named Robin Miller Award.

In the same way a dog’s daily contributions to the lawn are hard to miss, Miller’s lifetime of contributions to the sport also became hard to ignore. IndyCar’s Mark Miles, Jay Frye, and Mike Zizzo arranged a secret presentation for Miller who, if he’d known in advance, would have never turned up to receive the plaque bearing his name and a nice inscription from the series. Some poor bastard will take home the Robin Miller Award next May and spend the rest of the year asking where their career took the wrong turn.

Miles & Company corralled a bunch of his friends, from A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Bobby Unser, Johnny Rutherford, and other legends whose exploits were memorialized by the Indy car crew member-turned-reporter.

For once, our beloved windbag was nearly silent upon being honored by the dozens in attendance. For the guy who preached ‘hate is good’ for so many years, it was nice to see some overdue love sent his way.

HATE: Shakerhenge

Ooof. Tony Kanaan and Matheus Leist had a brutal season with A.J. Foyt Racing. It killed Leist’s open-wheel career and left the 2013 Indy 500 winner bombarded with questions as to whether he was long overdue for retirement.

TK’s quote early in the year regarding their lack of pace, which was repeated a few times with different phrasing, was simply brilliant: “I might not be Scott Dixon,” he said, “but I’m not two seconds slower than Scott Dixon.”

Following the theme, Kanaan might not be at a stage in his career where taking down Josef Newgarden and Alexander Rossi to capture a second championship is realistic, but he hasn’t forgotten how to drive.

Understanding why the team, which fired Kanaan’s race engineer and assistant engineer/damper engineer moments after the checkered flag flew at Monterey, was so out to lunch, makes for a fascinating tale. The team, on multiple occasions throughout the year, expressed its bewilderment with the bog-slow ABC Supply Chevys, noting how it had spent a small fortune on a new cutting-edge damper program and countless days shipping a car and staff to the east coast to rent time on the prohibitively expensive suspension testing apparatus known as a ‘shaker rig.’
A data calibration problem helped to send the Foyt team’s season into the weeds. Image by Abbott/LAT

I’ve heard this one from a few people who aren’t prone to sharing nonsense, and they’ve all said the same thing: More than 20 days were spent on a shaker rig to try different damper builds and suspension setups, but on the critical end where all the rig’s instrumentation data is fed back to the computer, a correlation problem was discovered.

Simply put, and without delving into the minutia, wrong numbers were found to be in place for the majority of the costly tests, and with those wrong numbers, lessons that were potentially valuable – and fast – from the shaker rig were rendered useless as false conclusions were drawn. What a waste.

I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Spinal Tap where the band accidentally wrote 18 inches rather than 18 feet as the height of its proposed Stonehenge model, and got what it asked for. Spinal Tap meets IndyCar. Who’da thunk it.

LOVE: Tears of joy

I loathe the overused and rarely sincere phrase ‘blood, sweat, and tears.’ It’s almost never true; one or two might have been shed, but not all three. The exception was revealed in 2019 as Mazda’s factory DPi team finally broke through with its first IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship victory at Watkins Glen.

Two more wins followed as the once-hapless Mazda Team Joest outfit found the reliability it lacked to book trips to Victory Lane. Mazda Motorsports boss John Doonan, the program’s heart, was a tearful mess at the Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen. He’d bled for the project – nothing major, but there were a few band-aids seen – as he helped assemble bodywork from time to time, and his sweat was on constant display as he willed the team through years of crushing defeats to deliver on its potential.

I’m sure there were more than a few people who watched Doonan cry that day and shed a tear of their own.

HATE: Dirty deeds at the dry lake

I won’t rehash most what I’ve already written about, ad nauseum, with the ridiculous dealings at Laguna Seca. The fix was in from the outset. Monterey County’s board of supervisors, many of whom received significant campaign contributions from the person they chose to take over the running of the track, should be held accountable for their underhanded actions, but they appear to have gotten away with a smear campaign designed to drive the final nail in SCRAMP’s credibility, and the rigged selection process that followed. Without state or local oversight and review of the process, there’s little chance of a fair and impartial search for SCRAMP’s replacement.
The process of replacing SCRAMP as Laguna’s track operator was flawed from the start. Image by Cantrell/LAT

My greatest concern lies is in the decisions made on December 24. A number of SCRAMP employees were notified, by email, that they would not be part of the county’s future plans, and were given a termination date of December 31. That part’s not a surprise in any regime change.

Where epic stupidity is found comes in the form of Ann Bixler’s release. As SCRAMP’s veteran VP of operations, Bixler has stood tall as the go-to person for everything, and is spoken of with immense reverie – even by those who openly hate SCRAMP. Her institutional knowledge of the facility and decade’s worth of close relationships with the sanctioning bodies, teams, TV partners, and all who come to Laguna Seca and work within its boundaries for the weekend is irreplaceable. And yet, she’s packing up her belongings and reading to say farewell to the double-wide trailer she’s worked out of next to the track’s gas pumps.

Ann will be fine. She’ll be hired elsewhere and bring immediate improvements to whatever she touches. This note is about the epic decision-making failure by the county, when given a chance to signal whether it grasps the value of the one person they can’t afford to lose, and how faith in the new management team is below rock bottom.

Imagine Team Penske being sold and the new owner replacing team president Tim Cindric. Or Corvette Racing being bought and releasing crew chief Dan Binks. That’s what just happened with Monterey County and Ann Bixler.

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2019 loves and hates, part 2

Image by Levitt/LAT
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emailBy: Marshall Pruett | January 1, 2020 9:03 AM

LOVE: Do cry for me, Argentina

The flat broke guy who sold his tools to pay the bills, who borrowed $300 from his grandmother to move from Argentina to America, who didn’t speak a word of English, who found work as a kart mechanic, who was good enough to take on running small open-wheel teams in Florida, who scraped the money together to start his own team, who earned multiple Road To Indy championships, who borrowed large sums to build a shop of his own in Speedway, Indiana, who stretched himself to the limits to acquire two IndyCars from the defunct KV Racing team, who lost his primary sponsor before the 2019 Indy 500, whose driver crashed in practice and forced the team to go to an unprepared backup car, went out and sent the mighty McLaren Racing and Fernando Alonso home on the final lap of qualifying?
You’d be emotional too if you’d been through what Juncos had before Kyle Kaiser put the car into the Indy 500 field. Image by Levitt/LAT

Are you kidding me? For some, Roger Penske’s purchase of IndyCar and IMS is the biggest story of 2019. For others, the McLaren/Alonso debacle was the lead story. For #mepersonally, I’ll always think back to this season and go directly to the little Juncos Racing team, owner Ricardo Juncos, and driver Kyle Kaiser as the authors of the greatest story of all.

It was the movie Rudy combined with the Miracle on Ice in four-wheeled form. Unbelievable, and unforgettable.

HATE: Z-Sports

Another year, another year with zero representation by IndyCar in the e-sports realm, or a dedicated video game solution. It’s become a running joke at this point. Would having a presence in the world of gaming benefit IndyCar as it attempts to attract a younger demographic and earn new fans? Yes. Has this been the case throughout the decade? Yes. Is it too late to bother? Probably.

LOVE: Beer me

If you follow Mike Hedlund’s social media accounts, you might get the impression his greatest passion in life is making beer. Imagery of the Bay Area resident’s efforts to turn his home-based microbrewery into a full-fledged bar on the peninsula continue to dominate his timelines, and of late, those photos have been joined his other passion—spraying champagne from the top step of the podium.
“The IPA’s not ready; might as well go and race the Acura this weekend.”
Image by Baker/LAT

Hedlund’s early success in Silicon Valley made becoming a pro-am sports car racer possible, and while he has numerous results from earlier in the decade that were impressive, it was his partial season of GT World Challenge America with RealTime Racing and co-driver Dane Cameron that brought most of the smiles. Six wins in an Acura NSX GT3 gave Hedlund his greatest results to date, and why wasn’t he in the RTR car for the entire season? He had beer to make.

What an amazing life.

HATE: Care to GESS who didn’t deliver?

As a famed San Diego broadcaster once said, ‘Well, that really got out of hand fast.’

The GESS International group swept into and out of IndyCar faster than most new sponsors. Relying on a former junior open-wheel racer as its emissary, the renewable energy firm agreed to a unique tactic at the onset of the 2019 season by funding drivers, rather than teams, and before long, it found a regular home with Harding Steinbrenner Racing. If the rumors are true, payments to the team weren’t nearly as regular, and when some arrived, they were much smaller than expected.

It was suggested the reduced payouts came as a result of excessive nitpicking. If the contract called for a GESS logo to be 24 inches wide on a piece of pit equipment, and it measured out at 23.5 inches, the emissary raised a stink and docked the team for the ‘violation.’ It was also suggested this practice had little to do with genuine anger over minor issues, but rather, a larger attempt to find ways to whittle the bills down to the smallest number possible. The simple solution would have been to ask the team to print new stickers that were a half-inch wider, or taller, or whatever was needed to make the sponsor happy. Starved for cash, it’s believed HSR had no choice but to live with the shoddy situation and hope some money would eventually arrive.

Despite posturing and denying anything was amiss with the multi-race sponsorship deal, the GESS branding eventually disappeared from HSR’s lone entry. One of the associate brands that came with the GESS deal, Capstone, stepped up and filled the void, helping HSR to complete the season, which culminated in Colton Herta’s field-stomping win at Laguna Seca.
Harding Steinbrenner’s rollercoaster 2019 included some sponsorship headaches. Image by Levitt/LAT

The program, as I was told, was meant to replicate the old Target sponsorship model where the main company – GESS, in this instance – got other brands to come along and foot the bill. GESS would receive the lion’s share of space on the car at almost no (or maybe zero) cost, and the associate brands were none the wiser. Well, until HSR the forgotten-payment asshattery made it to another team.

After announcing an associate sponsorship for GESS across Andretti Autosport’s Indy 500 entries, a second announcement as primary sponsor for Alexander Rossi’s car at Texas and Pocono was made. Rossi’s No. 27 Honda did indeed carry the green and white colors of GESS, but it failed to turn up for Pocono. Andretti’s default marketing program, the in-house (and awesome) MilitaryToMotorsports.com initiative, which gets used when it doesn’t have sponsorship for an event, was worn on the No. 27 that weekend.

senor honda

2019 loves and hates, part 2

Image by Levitt/LATBy: Marshall Pruett | January 1, 2020 9:03 AM

LOVE: Big day for BC39

Clauson Marshall Racing was the first name mentioned by myself and countless others as the first team to fail to qualify for the Indy 500. There was no question. And then, as a reminder of why the old idiom ‘never assume, because it makes an ass out of u and me’ exists, the upstart short-track team with no IndyCar experience humbled idiots like yours truly by demonstrating aptitude and pace throughout practice.
Clauson Marshall defied expectations in Indy qualifying. Image by Abbott/LAT

By the time Indy’s crucial first day of qualifying arrived, where the fastest 30 cars would be locked in and the rest would be kicked into Sunday’s single-run knockout session to make the last row, the little operation owned by Tim Clauson and Richard Marshall, with Pippa Mann piloting a Chevy-powered chassis leased from A.J. Foyt, secured 30th in the field.

Run in honor of Clauson’s late son Bryan, the power of Indy yet again was felt as the No. 39 entry earned what felt like a victory. The story wasn’t over, though, as Mann drove to a 16th-place finish, directly ahead of 2008 Indy 500 winner and five-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon of Chip Ganassi Racing. A dream debut with a dream finish.

HATE: The Irish scapegoat

The dark side of fear was visited upon veteran Indy car driver and Indianapolis TV analyst Derek Daly in February when his employer of 30 years displayed all the character of a piddling chihuahua. Shaken by the false accusation by an aged sports broadcaster who errantly attached a decades-old racist slur to Daly, WISH-TV wasted no time in firing the Irishman.

Rather than conduct the most cursory investigation into the claim, it cut Daly loose and soon found itself on the receiving end of a sizable lawsuit from its former employee. Daly, to his credit, came forth to acknowledge a different and unrelated slur used on a radio show in the 1980s, which spurred RACER’s Robin Miller to drive straight to Daly and offer an education in American idioms and slang, that led to the offending phrase being stripped from Daly’s vocabulary.

For the perceived offense that led to his ouster at WISH-TV, the aged accuser admitted his error, but rather than reverse course, the TV station chose to wallow in its mistakes and double down on its position, which led to the $25 million lawsuit.

Words, allegedly spoken more than 30 years ago, as misremembered by someone, was all it took for a longstanding relationship to be severed. I’m loath to play the role of an apologist for someone who uses racist language, but this was just stupid on every level.

LOVE: Lumberjacks are OK

Pfaff Motorsports had a grand old time throughout their first season of IMSA racing. The Canadian team representing Canada and Pfaff’s many auto dealerships turned up in January with its Porsche 911 GT3 R decked out in the finest plaid livery the sport has known.
Plaid was SO 2019. This season it’ll be paisley. Image by LAT

And if its playful approach to vehicle presentation veered towards lighthearted, the Steve Bortolotti-led outfit showed how seriously it took the racing side as the endurance racing rookies nabbed third in the GT Daytona standings.

LOVE: Hello 1980s

Here’s a quick one: How about the Castrol and Motorcraft throwbacks the Ford GTs wore at the Rolex 24? The factory cars might’ve sounded like they were powered by Chipotle fart cannons, but the gorgeous colors gifted to fans at Daytona were all that mattered.

HATE: NOT MAGSNIFICENT

The rumors of Jan Magnussen’s impending exit from Corvette Racing began to circulate after the 24 Hours of Le Mans. If the rumors that followed are true, the Danish legend was notified of his upcoming departure from the program – after umpteen years – well before the final races of the year, which meant he was bound to secrecy while closing out his time as a factory driver.
Magnussen’s long tenure at Corvette Racing came to an end. Image by Dole/LAT

If that’s what the team and Magnussen agreed to do, there’s not much else to say. As an unabashed fan of Mags, however, the post-Petit Le Mans confirmation of his split with Corvette Racing meant there was no opportunity for his legion of supporters to say thank you and farewell at the season finale. Instead, a simple press release confirming the news everyone knew was all he received.

Of the many do-overs I’d love to see from 2019, a proper and fitting goodbye for Magnussen is near the top of the list.

LOVE: A fine half-century

The only problem with IMSA 50th anniversary is it ends on December 31. Teams and manufacturers routinely dressed their cars and drivers in paint schemes that paid tribute to the series’ divine past, the cars of IMSA were recognized as the featured run group at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, two luxurious books were produced to celebrate its history, and man, a bunch of great stories were told by legends young(ish) and old. Who’s up for keeping the revelry going into Year 51?

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LOVE: My people

One of the cool parts of getting such an early start in racing is having seen and experienced the best days of IndyCar and IMSA in the 1980s. Part of that journey included watching fellow youngsters Tommy Kendall and Dan Binks develop their magic in IMSA’s entry-level GTU class with their wailing double-rotor Mazda RX-7. The red, white, and blue Malibu Grand Prix-sponsored car tore through the category as the budding driver and chief mechanic honed skills that would take them to numerous titles in bigger and scarier cars.
The Rotary Club. Image by Marshall Pruett

It made seeing TK and Binks, back together in Monterey at the Rolex Reunion to run the old RX-7, a nostalgic affair that returned some of us to a time when we were skinnier and drank wine coolers. I hope to put together a video we filmed of the two old friends spinning yarns about IMSA in the 1980s and their relationship. Binks and Kendall got misty-eyed once or twice during the conversation, which spoke the bond they built over decades, centered around a silly little Mazda.

LOVE: The feels

It was the giant-slaying minnows of Colton Herta and Harding Steinbrenner Racing. It was Jordan Taylor working as hard to entertain us as Rodney Sandstorm as he did to win races for his father. It was Simon Pagenaud loving being an Indy 500 winner more than anyone I can recall in ages. It was Ryan Eversley, racing in the largely anonymous Michelin Pilot Challenge series, proving to be more popular and selling more swag each weekend than large swaths of the WeatherTech Championship drivers and teams. It was the unexpected response to the Hamburger & French Fry Show, as the most honest driver I know brought fans inside the sport in raw and revealing ways. It was Team Penske’s Jon ‘Myron’ Bouslog, who worked his way up from the bottom over 30 or so years, winning the IMSA DPi title in his new role as team manager. It was Oliver Askew and Rinus VeeKay rocking Indy Lights on their way to becoming IndyCar rookies in 2020. It was the rise of #BamThoor, Porsche’s GTLM title-winning Kiwi-Belgian combo of Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor smiling their way to IMSA’s factory GT honors. There must be 100 more items to mention in a year that held our attention from beginning to end.

LOVE: Billy Monger winning

The weekend of May 18-19 was almost too much to endure. If all the insanity playing out during Indy 500 qualifying and bumping wasn’t enough to make one’s brain melt and heart explode, we nearly fainted when news of Billy Monger’s first win landed on Sunday.

Two years removed from losing major portions of his legs in a sickening Formula 4 crash, the Briton conquered all Formula 3 comers in France at the Pau street circuit as changing conditions and tire strategy, plus some almighty driving on his part, gave his Carlin Racing team the victory.
And when he’s not winning at Pau, he’s a TV pundit. Image by Andre/Sutton

But racing’s cruelty is never far from resurfacing. Amid the tearful celebrations for Monger’s achievement within Carlin’s IndyCar team at the Speedway, two of its three entries would fail to qualify for the 500. That part I didn’t love.

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PRUETT: 2019 loves and hates, part 2

Image by Levitt/LAT
488 shares
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emailBy: Marshall Pruett | January 1, 2020 9:03 AM

HATE: Ford’s farewell

We knew it could happen, but heard it wasn’t, and then it was, and then it wasn’t, and then it might have been, but then it didn’t come to pass. It felt like the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing IMSA GT Le Mans program lived and died 20 times last season as the planned end to the four-year factory effort was the subject of multiple efforts to keep going.

A supposed stay of execution was in the works after Le Mans where a desire to keep the low-slung GTs in motion eventually petered out. Attempts to find sponsors to replace the factory backing, and privateers to buy the cars and keep the FCGR team intact also went through a series of possibilities before the call was made to conclude the project.
The Ford GTs absence will be felt, and in more ways than one. Image by Galstad/LAT

Without Ford, IMSA’s left with three full-time GTLM manufacturers and six full-time cars to put in front of fans. What was the best class to watch in recent years is now a question mark, and while I expect BMW, Corvette, and Porsche – plus the occasional Risi Competizione Ferrari – to deliver great racing, IMSA’s factory GT class leaves 2019 in a precarious place. All it takes is one more brand to say goodbye and GTLM is in a world of trouble.

HATE: When B.O.P. goes B.A.D.

If you read my columns or listen to my podcasts, you know how much I hate Balance of Performance. The practice used by IMSA, the FIA WEC, SRO GT America, and many other sports car sanctioning bodies to create parity among different models by adding or removing weight and power, or monkeying with aerodynamics, makes pre-determined winners and losers out of every field.

On its best days, BoP is barely noticed as cars hailing from America, Germany, Japan, England, Italy, and Lord knows where else all play together in a relatively even manner. In those rarest of instances, it’s hard to pick a winner before the green flag waves.

And then we have the worst days which, of all the racing I observed last season, went to IMSA and its mystifying handling of its DPi class. In particular, the noose it placed around the Cadillac DPi-V.R was maddening as the car that won the three opening races was choked to the point of being irrelevant from May through September. It took something close to a mutiny by Cadillac entrants and a follow-up meeting between the series and the brand’s racing management to loosen the noose, and those changes came late enough in the season to erase any realistic hopes of winning the Drivers’ or Manufacturers’ championships.
The Cadillacs were hit hard with the BoP stick. Image by Dole/LAT

If you dislike Cadillac, the asleep-at-the-BoP-wheel routine was wonderful. If you wanted to watch real competition, the negligence was maddening to endure. The one positive to come from it, I’d hope, is a short leash for those who control IMSA’s BoP decisions.

When people sitting in an office can make heroes or chumps out of major manufacturers or privateers with a few simple keystrokes, we’ve lost the reason for why we show up or tune in to watch.

LOVE: Y’all

Thank you. And you thank again. As you might know, it’s been a brutal year for my wife and I. With her fight against cancer that began 15 months ago, and its spread this year that pushed her to the limits of strength and faith, my role in life had to change. Waking up and chasing stories for RACER, or jumping from one plane to the next to cover IndyCar and IMSA for the site, was no longer an option. Caring for her, looking after the home front, and supporting my wife through multiple surgeries and hospital moves, plus moving house, became my one and only priority list. And at every step, you’ve been keeping us warm and encouraged with kind words, prayers, and donations.

And joining you, the number of drivers, team owners, mechanics, engineers, journalists, managers, and broadcasters who’ve called, texted, and continue to reach out and check in on my wife and I, has been completely overwhelming. The best kind of overwhelming.

Her fight is ongoing; it’s an endurance race, not a sprint, as I’ve said on my occasions.
Image by Levitt/LAT

And from the first day we learned of the life-changing experience that awaited us, to today, my family at RACER has set the bar for tireless care. The fear that immediately followed our diagnosis was one of uselessness. As one of very few people on the planet who makes his living by traveling to IndyCar and IMSA races to provide race coverage, losing the ability to fly and perform those duties is an instant invitation to be replaced by someone who can.

Recognizing my precarious situation and fragile mindset, RACER founder/owner Paul Pfanner was on the phone immediately with a simple message: “Worry about your wife, don’t worry about us, and we’ll be here when you’re ready or able to contribute. Your new job is caring for her, and that’s it.”

Between Pfanner, RACER’s incredible Molly Binks, Robin Miller, Mark Glendenning, Chris Medland, and the rest of the team, the level of understanding and banding together to fill my contribution void when we’re busy with chemotherapy, or physical therapy, or the litany of weekly appointments that keep us on the move, has been our security blanket.

We’re hoping I’ll be able to venture out to some tests or races in February or March, at the earliest, and to be honest, I’ll miss being at Daytona, but not as much as I’d miss being here for my girl. Thank you, yet again, from my wife and I, for all you’ve done for us. I’ve never met most of you, but it sure doesn’t feel that way.