It’s often said that winning a championship doesn’t happen in an instant, but is cultivated race after race over the whole season. Certainly, that’s true, but while a championship can’t be won in an instant, two contenders for the 2012 Firestone Indy Lights championship found that it can certainly be lost in an instant this past weekend on the Streets of Baltimore. Going into Baltimore, three drivers were battling for this year’s Indy Lights title, Sam Schmidt Motorsport’s drivers Tristan Vautier and Esteban Guerrieri and Andretti Autosport’s Sebastian Saavedra. Coming…
Read MoreTag: Guerrieri
Indy Lights – Championship Tightens Up After Toronto
The Firestone Indy Lights race on Saturday was just as chaotic and messy as the Star Mazda race on Sunday, even though there were only eleven drivers this past weekend. Four of the eleven would end up parked with broken equipment, on Lap 1 and the other two late in the race on Lap 30. A driver that we mentioned at the beginning of the season would be coming into strong form this season, Victor Carbone, put his #3 Sam Schmidt Motorsports machine on pole during a qualifying session where…
Read MoreIndyLights – Andretti Autosport Strikes Back
So far the 2011 Firestone Indy Lights Championship has been dominated by Sam Schmidt Motorsports. In past years, Andretti Autosport, when they were in partnership with AFS Racing, had fielded back-to-back championship winners with Raphael Matos (2008) and J.R. Hildebrand (2009). Up until the Toronto race, SSM drivers had won five of the six races, only losing the Barber race to Team Moore’s Victor Garcia (who may have been running with an illegal suspension). While there’s no doubt that the SSM staff is extremely talented, and they have been working…
Read MoreIndy Lights – Milwaukee Wrap-Up
Discord and dissension plagued this weekend’s Firestone Indy Lights event. The minimal car count on Saturday for qualification got smaller still on Sunday as Peter Dempsey pulled off the track refusing to take the green flag in protest to what he and his team, O2 Racing Technology, feel is favouritism shown to some teams by INDYCAR by ignoring technical violations found in post-race and post-qualifying inspections over the past years. In a release issued by the team later Sunday evening, it was revealed that not only were team officials and…
Read MoreIndyLights: Long Beach 100 Recap
Last week after the Firestone Indy Lights race at Barber Motorsports Park, I went on a bit of a rant regarding the need for these young aspiring drivers to learn a modicum of control. Apparently, many of their team managers went on similar rants as this week’s race on the Streets of Long Beach was far less chaotic. To be sure there were incidents and accidents, but just your normal racing incident type of things, not the mass carnage and mayhem we saw at Barber. For a circuit that has…
Read MoreRoad to Indy – Weekly Wrapup: 12/13 – 12/17
Once again, it’s been a good week for the newly titled Mazda Road to Indy program, although perhaps not AS packed as last week. We can’t always expect banner weeks like we’ve had recently, but still there are some big positives from this week’s news. We have the signing of a driver in Firestone Indy Lights, a couple of Firestone Indy Lights drivers graduating to the IZOD IndyCar Series, and some testing opportunities. Let’s start with the official driver announcements. Driver Announcements Charlie Kimball This Thursday, in a move we…
Read More