Last season, Graham Rahal came to St. Petersburg after a very disappointing outing at the season opener at Homestead. A wreck during practice convinced his team that discretion was the better part of valor, so they decided to hold him out of the event since he had very little time to practice on ovals before the event. The former CCWS team had just received their chassis thanks to the hectic nature of the last minute merger. Despite the setbacks of the first round, Graham Rahal went on to win at…
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F1 – Malaysia Qualifying Results
The Malaysian Grand Prix weekend brings what many consider the real start to the F1 season, as Melbourne is a bit of an outlier because of the safety cars that it generates. However, with new street circuits at Valencia and Singapore, there seem to be less of these pure tracks left on the calendar. And now with the steward interactions of Australia behind us (maybe for Hamilton & McLaren) we can get on to the business of seeing the true pace of these 2009 specification cars. As with Melbourne, the…
Read MoreIndyCar – St. Petersburg Practice
The IndyCar series returns to the streets of St. Petersburg this weekend, but this year it serves as the season opener. Even though the looming threat of the economy has cast a pall over the offseason activities of the series, the first race will still provide us 22 competitors (down from 26 last season). And while the series is down on cars from last season, the strength of the series is showing through. IndyCar practice took place today and there were some pretty surprising results: Pos Driver No Difference Best…
Read MoreF1 – Vettel to Talk with Stewards Again
Sebastian Vettel has been summoned before the stewards at Malaysia. Christian Horner stated the following to Autosport: “Steward advisor Alan Donnelly has asked to have a chat with Sebastian to go through the rationale behind their penalty. I thought the penalty was harsh; we thought it was very much a racing incident – Sebastian was defending his line and the eventual decision depended on what was specifically discussed during the stewards’ hearing. I think Alan wanted to speak to Sebastian about that, to discuss the long and short of it.”…
Read MoreF1 – Hamilton Excluded from Melbourne
Lewis Hamilton was summoned before the race stewards at Malaysia where they have ruled that he and McLaren “acted in a manner prejudicial to the conduct of the event by providing evidence deliberately misleading to the Stewards”. This after radio transmissions between the team and the driver were reviewed. Therefore, the stewards have excluded McLaren from the race results. Hamilton has been stripped of his retroactively applied 3rd place finish and Jarno Trulli will retroactively re-assume his 3rd step on the podium. Open Paddock would like to express our extreme…
Read More28 Cars for Indy Lights
The Indy Lights series is starting off this weekend at St. Petersburg with a huge field of 28 cars for their two races. The field includes 18 rookies, the brother of CCWS driver Nelson Phillepe, Justin Wilson’s brother, past champions Jay Howard and Wade Cunningham, and several standout drivers such as JR Hildebrand, Logan Gomez, Pippa Mann (who beat up on all the boys in preseason testing), Ana Beatriz and Jonathan Summerton. This monster entry list in for the feeder category is a huge vote of confidence for the value…
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Hamilton Summoned by Stewards
As the week goes on, we are given one reminder after another that the FIA prefers to rule F1 as a bloated parliamentary bureaucracy instead of as race directors. Flashback to the Australian GP during the last safety car period. Hamilton passed Jarno Trulli when his car went off course, despite a very respectable effort of starting from pitlane and bringing his car up to 3rd position. Hamilton passed him since he was off circuit, and then later slowed down so much that Jarno thought he was having problems, so…
Read MoreTagliani and Manning In for St. Pete
As we reported earlier, Dreyer and Reinbold prepared a second car for St. Petersburg but had not yet officially announced a driver or submitted it to the entry list for this weekend’s festivities. While we here at Open Paddock surmised that Tomas Scheckter would most likely get the nod since he has been toting bags of cash looking for somebody to help him overcome his half-shaft habit, we also suggested that Milka Duno couldn’t be ruled out. In both cases, we were wrong. Darren Manning has been tapped to fill…
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