Motor Sports Weekly News

By: Drew Hierwarter

It used to be the driver and the mechanics and the crew chief were the keys to getting the car set up to go fast enough to win the race. Nowadays it’s the team mathematician. He’s the guy who has to figure out how slow the driver can go to stay ahead of the competition, and still save enough fuel to get to the end of the race.

This weekend at Indy, as it seems to be more and more this season, the fastest car didn’t win the race. The car that went slow enough to use as little fuel as possible still had enough in the tank to pull into the most hallowed victory lane in all of motor sports.

Maybe NASCAR should look into calling for a mandatory fuel stop 25 laps before the end of every race so then everybody could race hard for the finish.

Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, just a few miles up the street from the big speedway, an era came to an end. NASCAR held the final races for the Camping World Truck and the Nationwide Series at Lucas Oil Raceway Park. (Formerly known as O’Rielly Raceway Park and Indianapolis Raceway Park) Starting next year those two series will race on the big speedway just like the Cup cars do now.

Both series began racing almost exclusively on short tracks, and both have been gradually moving away from the smaller tracks ever since. Yes it’s true that Lucas Oil Raceway Park is noticeably short of the kind of amenities everybody expects from “big time” auto racing. The bleachers are old, the rest rooms are sub-par, and the competitors have no real garage facilities. But there should still be a place in the sport for good old fashioned Saturday night style short tracks

A typical Nationwide Series crowd of forty thousand fans will stretch the capacity of Lucas Oil Raceway Park to near the limit. The atmosphere of a packed house adds to the excitement. But put those same forty thousand fans in the 250,000 seat capacity of Indianapolis Motor Speedway and, on TV, it will look like nobody came.