Indy 500 Congrats to Sam Hornish Jr.

[Dublin Buckeyes]

If you want to watch great recaps(1/2 hour) of races, and inside stories and stuff from before the IRL/CART split, here is a great link from a friend of mine where he was, and also still is as of yesterday, uploading his VCR tapes from over the years from 1980's-1995 at Indy, and 1996 and beyond of CART/Champ Car.

Very cool if you are into this stuff. He is about to upload Mid-Ohio 2000, a race that I was at, and can't wait to see again.

http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=champcar4ever&page=1

 

[NJ-Buckeye]

Interesting point, but the tires are not the issue. Actually today's tires are clearly better based on the fact that 100% of lap is full throttle. Tire performance or not, they are pedal to the floor all the time. The problem is the downforce making the cars to easy to drive.

... I have not heard of a reason why Firestone left the tire design to Bridgestone. I assume it is because after the tire war was over, there is no need to continue development, and Champ Car already had the better tires, so no need to remake something that is already better.

Couple points to note... tires today are not clearly better... and most tracks are not run pedal to the floor all the time... a key reason they had to tone the cars down is because it became obvious that the tracks were not built for the speed the cars had reached... they needed to either change all the tracks or slow down the cars... or everybody was going to die...

Firestone didn't leave the design to Bridgestone.. Bridgestone owns the company... and positioned itself as the high performance line.. and positioned Firestone as the mid tier run of the mil line.. but after a couple years recognized they couldn't afford to pay the advertising costs to convey the Bridgestone positioning.. so they used the Firestone brand name for marketing purposes... since it at least had name recognition...

ONLY the NASCAR circuit has product loyalty... so sponsors bailed on the other circuits because it just didn't make sense... NASCAR fans are the only fans with documented and huge brand loyalties... Sponsors are not as interested in winning as they are in sales, per se... Stockholders don't care about your trophies...

 

[ekeen]

On a side note: wonder what the NASCAR fans think about Toyota running cars in their league next year. There's a write-up about it in Sporting News this week.