March shouldn’t be like this should it? I look out my window upon a beautiful blanket of virgin snow the aesthetic qualities of which are in inverse proportion to the trouble it takes to get rid of it, even digging my way to the snow blower could see me lost for possibly weeks!
This winter has taught me much, mainly that it may never end, but it has revealed more about some of the current icons of American racing that could reasonably be expected in a whole season.
William Shakespeare’s shorter comedies seldom enter my thoughts while watching motorsport, well okay, maybe when Milka Duno or Reed Sorenson is trying to qualify on a road course, but that would normally be ‘A comedy of errors’. The last few months of activity, on and off the track have had me reaching for my copy of ‘Twelfth Night’.
"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them”
The Midweek Motorsport, no expense spared, but rights free, reconstruction of the 'Junior incident' at Daytona
There are three drivers who loosely fit into those categories above, all iconic figures whose stock has taken quite the beating over this winter. There is a whole other thesis to be written on the abuse of the word ‘great’ in sports writing and broadcasting, but we must leave that for another day.
In 1882, scientists at John Hopkins University slowly boiled a frog in water in order to provide me with an appropriate analogy 127 years later. Dale Junior has been in slowly boiling since the day he was born. The only difference between ‘Little E’ and that lab frog is that he is finally noticing how uncomfortable the temperature is getting. Take his alarming performance on his sport’s biggest stage, the Daytona 500. Not just the act of wiping out half the field on the back stretch but the lack of awareness of the location of his pit box and his inability to get the whole car into it once he had finally discovered it. His subsequent barking into any microphone that was placed in front of him smacked of a man who realizes that it’s year two in the best team in the sport and he has one very fortunate win under his belt.
Dale Earnhardt Junior, yesterday
So that alone would not a crumbling ego make, but the subsequent interview with Darrell Waltrip told us more about where his head is than anything that happened a week earlier. The inflated sense of entitlement could not be kept in check as his frustration flowed like toxic lava.
‘Most of the guys that have known me since I was a kid and know who I am, respect me, most of the guys that haven’t known me who have come into the sport in the last couple of years, that are younger than me, probably don’t’…….’because the popularity and the results don’t match up, they have a problem with a guy having that much popularity and not being able to have the same kind of results’
Junior manages to reveal a refreshing self awareness about his shortcomings in one breath while effectively demanding respect (mainly from Kyle Busch) with the next despite achieving little to warrant it besides competing every week with a famous name. He still fails to realize that racing with his father’s name on the car simply isn’t enough.
One has to wonder if the same can be said for Marco Andretti. What was he thinking when he blasted out of the pits in Kyalami during his mandatory stop in the A1GP feature race? What was going through his mind as he was first passed by the home town favorites, South Africa then Germany and finally by those leviathans of racing, Lebanon and Indonesia?
The World Cup of Motorsports has been anything but rich pickings for Marco and Andretti Green Racing through the darkest months. The race in South Africa was the fourth outing for the 21 year old and the fifth for the team with a fortunate third place as their only result of note so far. The lack of speed from the team and the seeming inability of Marco to work around set up issues have done nothing to promote the idea that Marco has a future at the highest levels of global open wheel racing. This is even more puzzling considering his performances for AGR outside the realm of open wheel racing in 2008. John Hindhaugh of the American Le Mans Series Radio Network for one has seen glimpses of his potential:
‘Standing on the outside of turn one at Sebring - I mean it's not like I hadn't seen seriously fast cars through there before, McNish, Brabham, even Kristensen were always impressive through there but the word had gone around the paddock that Marco HAD to be seen. So I dutifully pottered over on the ALMS Radio Network golf cart pulled up and waited... not for long ...as the distinctive howl of the Acura down the back straight told me the boy Andretti was on his way. There it was out of Sunset (turn 17) and on the way toward me, headlights ablaze. Then it was gone! No really just like that, almost before I could take it in.’
Andretti had taken the daunting turn one completely flat out, showing and a commitment and raw speed rarely, if ever, seen at the storied venue.
A further chat with the ALMS safety crew positioned nearby revealed that Marco had ‘been doing that since his first flying lap’. He continued to display this astonishing speed and skill throughout practice and most of the race.
Maybe this is the Marco that grandfather Mario, was talking about during his cameo at the USF1 launch last week. Mario may have assumed that being on TV so early in the day must have meant he was involved in an infomercial. That is the only plausible explanation for the sales job that followed.
‘I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again and I’ll back it up, if I were to design a Formula One driver today, I would design Marco. He learns quickly. He’s very much of a free spirit … the travel and all of the aspect does not phase him in the least.’
I fully expected Mario to conclude by saying that ‘if you call now we will add in a year of GP2 free, operators are standing by’. This was the broadcasting equivalent of your Grandfather telling all his friends that you hade made the varsity squad when in reality you were the mascot’s understudy. And was the final line above, a thinly veiled jab at his own son’s refusal to base himself in Europe during his stint with McLaren?
The USF1 launch also impacted on the final character in this sub Shakespearean tragedy, Danica. Her winter started with as comical a final act as anyone could have wished for as she left a uniquely shambolic imprint on the streets of Surfer’s Paradise. Her real value may have been uncovered in the run up to the televised press launch of USF1 last week. Ken Anderson’s statement that ‘She's great’ and ‘She gets a lot of press’, spoke volumes about her obvious commercial value while never addressing the key issues in terms of actual testing, set up and racing abilities on the road courses of Europe and elsewhere.
Peter Windsor is an astute media operative and he is well aware that there is no complex endorsement contract to be written or royalty structure to develop by simply allowing his team to be associated with a hugely high profile figure like Patrick. He literally gets hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of free and increased publicity by even vaguely associating her with his project. During the launch itself, Windsor mentioned six names, including three teenagers (one of which was 15 year old, Columbian born, Gaby Chaves) and a stock car driver with no open wheel experience, Kyle Busch, before he remembered to mention Danica.
In this case she was the thirty dollar, 52 inch flat screen TV that gets advertised in the run up to black Friday, the same one that is never there when you get to the store.
An exclusive list of Peter Windsor's notes as used at the USF1 (USGPE) launch
If her new found position as retail ‘door buster’ wasn’t bad enough she would have been further chastened by the discovery of her new neighbors at the first oval test for the Indy Car Series at Homestead last week. Danica finished 15th on the time sheets one place ahead of her UCF (Ultimate Cat Fighting) partner, Milka Duno.
So the question is can these three look past the ides of March and make this a glorious summer? I’m looking forward to viewing the unfolding drama from my box seat.
