Season Ending Preview

Well the Chase for the Championship is truly on now and the boys in the IRL and F1 are down to their penultimate races this weekend and next respectively. Even OWRS is down to their final two races, but they are a month away and really, who cares? In a way it is always sad to see the end of the racing season, but with the NFL to fill the void, it makes the end so much more palatable. And besides, the taxis still have another two months before they call it a season. It’s been a good season for a few teams and drivers and a tumultuous season for many teams, drivers and a couple of series. Ferrari with Michael Schumacher, the Sandwich, Jean Todt and Ross Brawn put up one of those dream seasons winning 14 of the 16 races so far with Schummi getting 12. In fact he started the season with 5 in a row before Jarno Trulli got him at Monaco. After that Michael rang up 7 in a row. Currently Rubens has won the past two after Kimi won at Spa. Like him or not, and I don’t, Schummi has shown this year how good he is. He just beat everyone to death until they cried uncle and by then it was over. I’ve seen Michael wrap up the title earlier than he did this year, but only because the Sandwich was getting so many second places. Honestly I have never seen anything like it from a driver or a team and that is a lot of racing. Buttons looks like he will finish third in the drivers championship. Fernando Alonso is just 4 points ahead of Trulli and JPM, but Jarno is out for the season before making the move to Toyota next year. JPM seems to have lost interest in driving the Williams, but he may be able to garner enough points to overtake Fernando. On the other hand Alonso will be keen to keep ahead of new, at least for the rest of this season, team mate Jacques Villeneuve. But with all of the good driving and fantastic venues for the F1 crowd there is trouble afoot. Last week Ford Motor Co. announced it was pulling the plug on its Jaguar F1 program and on the Cosworth engine program. Besides the obvious sting of losing two cars on the grid, Ford supplies the Jag as well as the Jordan and the Minardi teams with engines. In fact ripples can be heard here in America where the Cosworth is the only engine in OWRS and is a partner with Chevrolet in their IRL engine program. Now the scuttlebutt is that Cosworth will be sold and kept in business. That is the good news. The bad news is that team principals in F1 agree on only one thing, that costs are too high and must be cut. What gets cut and who agrees on what is a sheer crap shoot. These guys never agree on anything. I reported on here earlier in the summer about the changes proposed by Max Mosley. No one has made any move to approve them. Mosley says the changes are coming, but now the teams are saying the costs of change are too high. Max has lately resorted to using safety as his reasoning for the changes. He says the cars are too fast and corner too quickly. Yet it has been more than 10 years since the last fatality in F1. The older, more dangerous tracks are being replaced by newer, safer and modern racing facilities. Sure everyone will miss the speed of Silverstone, Eau Rouge at Spa and the part oval at Monza, but these tracks were designed at a different time for different cars. Some can be made safe enough. Some can not. The real problem with F1 lies with the FOM and Bernie Ecclestone. They are simply taking too much money from the sport. There, I said it. No one else seems to want to. Bernie is one of the wealthiest men on the planet. I don’t begrudge him his wealth, but F1 is his golden goose and if he kills it then he is the biggest asshole in the world. So this offseason will feature a lot of fighting and discussion over the future of the series. Personally I love it and I don’t want it to go away. I also lover the cars and the technology and know that it costs a shitload of money. Then we have the IRL. God love ‘em! The racing is fantastic regardless of the no brain OWRS fans say, but Tony George just leaves me wondering what he will pull next. He is no better than the owner board of CART that he wanted on. Fuck he had the Indy 500, why did he want to be involved any more than that? The league is coming to a crossroads. Probably not this year or even next, but unless attendance and those all important TV ratings start to go up, there will be no IRL. An honestly, I don’t think they will. For some reason you can have great racing, but so many fans were put off by the split that it will never be the same. Then fucking NASCAR has its snobby fans who think the sun rises and sets on some damn taxi cab. Oh they’re not all snobs, but there are a lot of them and I just don’t see why. The drivers aren’t all that compelling once you get past Jr. Jeffy, Schturt and Busch. The cars are all exactly alike and the rules are a joke. I guess judging by what I have wrote you would wonder if I really am a race fan, but rest assured I am. If I didn’t care I wouldn’t talk about it and this blog would never have been done. We still have a couple months until it is all over, but I just want to say how much fun it’s been and I am already looking forward to Melbourne next March!