I'm making an appearance on Speed Freaks tonight and their pre show 'hot topic' is concerning the legitimacy of Danica's one and only win in IndyCar seeing as Tony Stewart and Mark Martin have found victory lane in precisely the same fashion over the last couple of weeks in the Sprint Cup. I decided to dig out the blog piece I wrote in the immediate aftermath of Patrick's historic win in Japan.
- April 25th 2008
There was a time in the very early eighties when Grand Prix racing dominated the sporting headlines across Europe. ‘Tell us something we don’t know!!’ shouts everyone at once. But in this case I’m not talking about Brabham v Williams or Cosworth v Turbo. I mean Coe v Ovett v Cram and Ed Moses v the clock v everyone else in his wake. Battles raged on athletics tracks from Zurich to Rome all summer long.
My days as a sports mad 12 year old were marked out pretty much every night of week. I’d be out playing football or pitch and putt or tennis all day with an eye on the clock so I didn’t miss the start of the live coverage of the Grand Prix meeting from Cologne or Oslo, all of which was on proper network television, which somehow made it seem more important than it probably was.
There has always been something alluring and magical about any name said in a foreign language and/or with a foreign accent. Acqua Minerale conjures up glorious images of Ricardo Patrese blowing the San Marino GP lead at Imola in 1983 handing the win to Patrick Tambay’s #27 Ferrari as the Tifosi exploded in ecstasy. I’m not sure my memories would be as vivid if Imola had a corner called ‘mineral water’. The Welt Klasse meeting in Zurich was billed as the ‘Olympics in one night’, the greatest athletes in the world would be there and it was always a special Thursday night. I had no idea what ‘Welt Klasse’ meant but it sounded fantastic! On further examination I discovered it simply meant ‘World Class’ which in retrospect is somewhat disappointing, it seems to be the equivalent of naming your product based simply on a pronoun with as little ambition as ‘Quality Inn’ or ‘Lovely Cheese’ although the later product may only exist in my head.
The Norwegians never had that problem with the Bislett Games in Oslo. Their biggest event was the ‘Dream Mile’ it really did exactly what it said on the tin. It was a mile race which attracted the greatest middle distance field on earth. Year in and year out they would assemble for the race of the year. No doubt about it, this field was better than any Olympic final with the added bonus of a pacemaker or ‘hare’ to pull them along at something close to world record pace. This was an era where the world record for the 1500m and the mile would be broken almost every night somewhere in Europe, a truly ,astonishing and golden era for athletics.
Only the reigning Olympic 1500m champion, Sebastian Coe, was absent from the 1981 ‘Dream Mile’. It could hardly have been a more star-studded field unless Rob Halford had left Judas Priest and taken up middle distance running. The highly knowledgeable Oslo crowd sensed something big was about to take place. The ludicrously cocky Steve Ovett was planning to smash the World Record, he held it jointly with Coe at this time, and further ease the pain of his bronze medal for the 1500m in Moscow the previous season.
With this in mind pace-makers were instructed to push the pace along over the first 800 to 1200 metres, this job was assigned Tom Byers of the USA and he was joined up front by Wodajo Bulti of Ethiopia. Byers had been a distant 6th in the US Championships the week before this event (keep that in mind for later) and was there simply to keep the early pace at world record levels then drop out with a lap or so to go.
Byers pushed the pace forward at a pace that would have threatened the 800m world record let alone that of the mile. His pace was deemed to be so ludicrous that the chasing pack simply ignored him, or so we thought. Byers was 60 metres clear with 600 metres left and nobody was going to challenge him, the Oslo crowd knew what was happening and were totally behind him, banging the advertising hoardings and their Norwegian feet in rhythm with his pace.
This only served to spur Byres on even more and he neglected to step off track at the appropriate time, as all ‘hares’ do. Instead he just kept going onto the final lap, the pack only realized with 300 metres to go that they were racing for second place if they did not do something quickly; Ovett decided it was time to give chase. What was going through Byers head on that final bend is anyone’s guess, but somehow he held on for what has become one of the most amazing victories in athletics history?
At face value it is almost impossible to decipher the thought process of the chasing pack as Byers stretched his lead. All became much clearer when, in a rare interview, Ovett revealed that the official charged with giving the runners the split times, was giving the pack Byers times at the 400 and 800 metre distance, they had no clue that it was not they who were running at record pace but the tall long haired American way ahead in the distance.
So this group of world class athletes simply ignored the performance of the journeyman in front and simply chose to compete amongst themselves leading to one of the most unlikely victories in middle distance history. Now what does that remind you of?
Tom Byers was the second name that went through my head early on Sunday morning when Danica crossed the line to take victory and make history at Motegi. The first was Vittorio Brambilla; the Italian with one solitary GP victory to his name, the man who won in the wet in the rain shortened Austrian GP in 1975 only to put the car in the Armco barrier approximately 50 yards past the finish line.
Danica’s victory has catapulted Indy Car onto the front pages and into the headlines across the USA and that can only be good news for the series. Right now, there is almost no such thing as bad publicity for US open wheel racing. Closer inspection of her victory does lead one to the conclusion that it was simply a perfect storm of circumstances needed for any driver in the lower reaches of the top 10 to win an Indy Car race. For this win to take place, a number of elements had to be in place.
Primarily, the team in question needs to approach the race with the mindset that they would be unable to win in normal circumstances and strategy would be the overriding factor in their race preparation. Luck and timing need to be precisely right in terms of yellow flags and the length of each caution period. Finally there needs to be a collective arrogance or ignorance from the leading pack. Motegi delivered this on all three fronts and Andretti Green Racing capitalized beautifully by ticking every box correctly during the last section of the race.
If all of the teams had taken this approach we would have had the bizarre site of the pack racing at about 95% throttle for the last 25 laps or so in an attempt to avoid a final pit stop, but racers are racers and instinct clearly took over and to a man (quite literally) they chose to floor it and gamble on fuel mileage.
If they had all used Danica’s approach we would have had an athletics style sprint finish off the last corner and it would have been won by whoever had the best throttle response, I do find that quite appealing to be honest. It would have made for great TV!
So right now, as I write this on the eve of the Road Runner 300 at Kansas, we are none the wiser as to what her victory really means. I have made no secret of the fact that I believe she has probably had her moment in the sun. Indy Car fields are only going to get stronger and the number of oval races will be limited to about a half dozen from now on and she has little or no hope of repeating that feat on a road course or on a street circuit. She has done something remarkable that she may well never do again. Is she the Tom Byers of open wheel racing? In all probability the answer is yes.
The best case scenario for her is that she becomes the Leonhard Stock of Indy Car. Stock is the Austrian that baffled the entire world by winning the 1980 Olympic downhill gold at Lake Placid. He had almost no previous form and barely scraped into the team as number two to the great Franz Klammer who took gold in 1976 and again 1984. It was another 9 years and 100 or so events later that Stock won again, this time in a World Cup downhill event. So we can look for Danica to trouble the scorers again in about 2016 when she is 35 or so.
This whole piece is a roundabout way of saying that errrr let me see, how would Ron Dennis describe this? To quote Ron, it would be an ‘infrequent ultra violet canine posterior interface scenario’.
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