 | RACING PERSPECTIVESGanassi Team Takes Third Rolex 24 Trophy
by Russell Schmidt - Racin' With Russ
01/31/2008
Scott Pruett wheeled the winning Lexus/Riley race car across the line at Daytona International Speedway after the grueling 24 hour show ended. His teammates Juan Pablo Montoya, Memo Rojas and Dario Franchitti created an impressive talent combination in notching a third consecutive win for Team Ganassi, breaking the old record of only back-to-backer checkers.
After completing nearly 700 laps at a rough average of 120 mph, the whole team performed as a well-oiled machine in racking up this very prestigious win in the world of endurance competition.
Other names you’ll probably recognize such as Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch and AJ Almendinger spent long segments behind the wheel of other cars finishing second, third and 14th overall respectively.
An unusual amount of caution periods, 24 in all for 95 laps slowed down the action and kept the overall lap count down with only 18 hours of green flag action.
If you caught any of the 17 hours of live coverage, you saw a well-covered event with many camera angles and pit reporters keeping us up with the latest on and off track news.
Some of those teams performed some minor miracles in taking nearly destroyed cars back to on-track condition in less than 20 minutes….Yeomen work for sure!
Pruett drove in the fastest class known as Daytona Prototypes, finishing two laps ahead of the nearest competitor.
In the other division known as GT, the ranks are filled with mostly Porsches, Mazda RX-8’s and a handful of Corvettes, Mustangs and Ferrari’s.
Ordinarily there is a long line of Porsches topping the charts. This year, the Mazda RX-8 of Sylvan Tremblay stomped the German juggernaut with an eight lap lead at the stripe. Very impressive! It will be interesting to see if this trend continues throughout the season.
Nationwide Testing last week at Daytona saw Eric Darnell top the charts in his Roush-Fenway Ford Fusion. Others topping the charts included Tony Raines, Chase Miller, Steve Wallace (when he wasn’t crashing into chain link fences in the pits) and Scott Wimmer.
This week, the Sprint Cup teams and Nationwide teams test at Las Vegas. Then, during this Western swing of pre-season testing, the Cup teams will test at California Speedway later in the week using Wednesday as a travel day.
From Rumorville - There are several new rules for Sprint Cup racing this year starting with two rules on pit lane. Teams will no longer have the luxury of rolling tires across the pits to the wall for someone to catch. From now on, a crewman will have to control the tire from halfway out to the wall. The other new pit lane rules deals with when a car stalls. You used to see crews pushing cars often the length of pit lane to get a car started. No more…crews will have only three pit spots to get the car going, or push it back to their pit box.
Kenny Wallace has finally landed a full-time gig for 2008, this one in a Fitz Racing Dodge. Sponsor, numbers and crew chief details are still being worked out.
More rule changes are in store for the NHRA drag racers including qualifying where 12 drivers will be locked in on the first day of qualifying, yet four more can be added with fast times on the final day.
Owner of the Indy Racing League, Tony George, has made the Champ Car Series participants a very tempting offer in an effort to once again unify American open wheel racing. George is offering free Honda engines and free cars along with adding five of their scheduled dates. The deal is on the table for 2008, but it might be too late to put it all together where 2009 might be more feasible. This is a generous offer and many of us will be holding our breaths to hear the answer. What do you think? Should the two rejoin forces or just let the Champ Car series die away, which is very close to happening with a very small driver lineup and a terrible TV package set for this year. Drop me a line and let me know.
Did you know? Which track on the NASCAR circuit has the largest seating capacity? If you said Indianapolis with 252,000, you are correct. Other tracks with large seating numbers include Lowe’s Motor Speedway (171,000), Daytona (165,000), Bristol (160,000) and Texas (155,000). At the other end of the spectrum is Watkins Glen with only 41,000 permanent seats, although many more camp throughout the vast infield. Been there...done that.
That’s it for this week. Next week’s RWR will discuss the results of pre-season Sprint Cup and Nationwide testing from Las Vegas and California, and more racing news from around the globe.
Questions? Comments? Contact Russ at racinwithruss@comcast.net
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