Brickyard 2004 Weekend

NASCAR
Well another Brickyard 400 is behind us and congrats are in order for Jeff Gordon. He simply dominated the field to win his fourth Brickyard and his fifth race of the season. I’m sure he cheated, but until the investigation is complete I will just say congrats.
Junior held up pretty well and completed the race. He had trouble on one of his pit stops that really cost them but in all honesty he had a 6th to 8th place car at best. Finally though a blown tire and crash caused him to finish 27th. He remains third in the points and in fact the top 10 did not change. However, Mayfield dropped a position to 12th and Kasey Kahne moved up to 11th and neither are that far out of the top 10.
The race was sloppy as hell. 13 yellow flags caused the speed to drop to just over 115 mph. It was a pretty good weekend. The weather was perfect and the crowds were good. There was even more dicing than ever before during the race. I attribute that to the fact that the older guys are now so much more adept at running at Indy and the younger guys don’t know any better.
F1
The big bombshell was in the F1 ranks this weekend. Jensen Buttons surprisingly has signed on with Williams for the 2005 season. In a completely unexpected move, a loophole in Buttons’ BAR contract apparently has allowed the Brit to move to the Grove team. There has been speculation that bonuses agreed upon for Buttons have not been paid. What seemed like a cohesive team may have been a boiling cauldron all along.
Of course now speculation runs rampant on who will replace Buttons. There is already talk of releasing him now and bring up test driver Anthony Davidson for complete the balance of the season. Some reporters think this is a bad idea since Davidson has not raced in a couple of years. This argument is ridiculous unless the intention was to keep him as a test driver forever. If Buttons is as unhappy as it sounds, then cut his ass now.
Jarno Trulli’s name has been bandied about as has Jacques Villeneuve’s.
As for Williams I guess this will put to rest my prediction that Jeff Gordon will be in the other BMW seat. I don’t see Jeffy in the Honda and frankly I think he took out his frustrations on the rest of the field yesterday at IMS.