OP-Ed – The Role of a Series

The Indianapolis 500 made good gains this year in both attendance and viewership, but the rest of the season hasn’t been as rosey. This got me thinking, what makes for a successful series? What standards should we use? When I think of various series throughout motorsports that are perceived to be successful, Le Mans and ALMS come to mind, as does Formula 1, SCORE, IndyCar (in its various forms AAA/USAC/CART/IRL), and NASCAR. However, what makes those series memorable isn’t the whole sequence of races that make up the series, but…

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MotoGP – Race Day at Indianapolis

Race day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the 2nd running of the Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix, the twelfth stop on the MotoGP schedule. There was no way the weather could have been worse than last year as the remnants of Hurricane Ike slammed into the Speedway shortening the 125cc and GP races, and canceling the 250cc race, but no one expected the weather to be as absolute gorgeous as it was. Sunrise on Sunday morning found many fans shivering and wrapped up in blankets and jackets as temperatures…

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MotoGP – Saturday Qualifying

The weather during morning warmup was unseasonably cool, again. However, this is likely a good thing since Race Day will be even cooler. It gave the teams perhaps a chance at guessing the grip level correctly for the race and qualification. Tyre degradation was an issue all morning long, and during qualifications. Neither the tyres or the cool weather seemed to phase Dani Pedrosa in the slightest, as he set a new track record of 1’40.271″ during FP2 in the morning. During qualifications, he set a new track record again…

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