Weekend Brief

Busy week for me so here is the schedule of races for this weekend (5/6-5/8).  Expect a re-cap early next week.


>GT1 World Championship and GT3 Euro Championship Algarve (various time slots)

>AMA Supercross Finale, Las Vegas Saturday 10:00PM Eastern

>Formula 1 Turkey Sunday 8:00am Eastern

Brazil Rundown

So the rain delayed Sao Paulo Indycar race went down early Monday morning.  The restart threatened to make it just as bad of a day as Sunday's attempt.  The cars rolled out for their parade laps on slick tires, and just before the start, the rain came back.  Miraculously the field was able to make it through the first four corners to dive into pit lane for rain tires.  The race went off relatively calm after that, Bourdais had a shunt into a tire wall, and although the car lacked visible damage, Sebastian shut the car down and walked back in.  On a restart KV/Lotus racing's Takuma Sato (a Formula 1 alum) passed road course ace and championship contender Will Power, in a textbook outbraking manuever.  Another of the KV cars, EJ Viso was also running toward the front late into the race.  But with about 8 laps to go, both of them had to stop for fuel.  A strategic fuel stop earlier done by team Penske allowed Will Power to take over the lead, and he drove it to the finish.  Graham Rahal finished 2nd, with Briscoe, Franchitti, and Servia rounding out the top 5.


Point Standings (top 12)
1 Power < has taken advantage of the road courses in the early season
2 Franchitti < defending champion, will be a threat for the 500 on the 29th
3 Servia < has finished in the top 10 every race, slowly climbing the ladder
4 Mike Conway < won in Long beach and finished 6th in Brazil
5 Ryan Briscoe < made up for a slow start with two good performances
6 Tony Kannan < was involved in Sunday's incidents but has been solid for KV
7 Alex Tagliani < sold his team but it looks like its helping his pace
8 Scott Dixon < expect his fuel mileage prowess to show up as wins on ovals
9 Graham Rahal < finally gelling with his new team, had a great wet drive
10 Takuma Sato < gets good finishes but needs to keep it out of the wall
11 Simona de Silvesro < caught up in 2 incidents, has potential for top 10
12 Vitor Meira < has shown consistency, expect a good oval program with Foyt

Delay

The rain yesterday at the Indycar race in Brazil postponed the event.  This morning around 8am Eastern (right now) Torrential downpours caused incidents like these.

I will be posting another update when able.

It was also a bad weekend for scary accidents.  The first video is from a Porsche Cup race at Imola (Italy) where two cars get together causing one to go airborne to frightening effect.  The second is a video from a V8 Supercars race in Australia, where a car stalls on the start, and is hit from behind by another driver, rupturing the fuel cell.  Fortunately all of the drivers in these videos walked away from the scene of their accidents.