101st Indy-Alonso 500

[TJ]

With this years news that a current F1 drive will try and go win the roundy roundy thing in Murrrica instead of going to Monaco, there might be some interest here

http://92.ipfsnet.com/50017_trackmap.jpg

Indianapolis Motor Speedway

Also Known As: The Brickyard
First Race: 1911
Track Length: 2.5 mi (4.0 km)
Race Distance: Really? You can call it the Indianapolis 800, but you’ll get laughed at.
Number of Laps: 200
Surface: 2.4996 mi asphalt, 0.0004 mi bricks
Turns: 4
’Winningest’ Drivers: A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, Rick Mears (4 wins apiece)
’Winningest’ Manufacturer: Chassis – Dallara, Engine – Offenhauser (Anyone fancy running a Dallara Offenhauser?)
Previous Winner: Alexander Rossi

F1 driver who is a rookie

http://92.ipfsnet.com/50017_nando.jpg

F1 driver who has won here twice

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F1 driver who didn't do much in F1 except overtake the rookie at Canada in 2007, and is a source of frustration in Indycar.

https://cdn-1.motorsport.com/static/img/mgl/100000/160000/165000/165700/165701/s8/f1-united-states-gp-2004-podium-takuma-sato.jpg




Rest of the field

2017 INDIANAPOLIS 500 LIST

AJ FOYT RACING (Chevrolet)
No.4 Conor Daly
No.14 Carlos Munoz
No.40 Zach Veach

ANDRETTI AUTOSPORT (Honda)
No.26 Takuma Sato
No.27 Marco Andretti
No.28 Ryan Hunter-Reay
No.29 Fernando Alonso (with McLaren Honda)
No.50 Jack Harvey (with Michael Shank Racing)
No.98 Alexander Rossi (with BHA/Curb Agajanian)

CHIP GANASSI RACING (Honda)
No.8 Max Chilton
No.9 Scott Dixon
No.10 Tony Kanaan
No.83. Charlie Kimball

DALE COYNE RACING (Honda)
No.18 Sebastien Bourdais
No.19 Ed Jones
No.63 Pippa Mann

DREYER & REINBOLD (Chevrolet)
No.24 Sage Karam

ED CARPENTER RACING (Chevrolet)
No.20 Ed Carpenter
No.21 JR Hildebrand

HARDING RACING (Chevrolet)
No.88 Gabby Chaves

JUNCOS RACING (Chevrolet)
Spencer Pigot
Sebastian Saavedra

LAZIER PARTNERS RACING (Chevrolet)
Buddy Lazier

RAHAL LETTERMAN LANIGAN (Honda)
No.15 Graham Rahal
No.16 Oriol Servia

SCHMIDT PETERSON MOTORSPORTS (Honda)
No.5 James Hinchcliffe
No.7 Mikhail Aleshin
No.77 Jay Howard

TEAM PENSKE (Chevrolet)
No.1 Simon Pagenaud
No.2 Josef Newgarden
No.3 Helio Castroneves
No.12 Will Power
No.22 Juan Pablo Montoya

Last few years have actually been pretty damn exciting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrFIc6RJKGU - 2012, Sato goes all in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeREa0HUrXY - 2014, watch the wives of drivers as they battle in a late shootout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EJviUZFkgE - Monty wins - last 15 laps are intense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7BZrwSLSZE - 2016, fuel or failure

This is on after Monaco, so a long night of motorsport.

A magical race.

[TJ]

Also - on live on Foxtel

And a plethora of illegal streams

[TJ]

Perfect timing - autosport plus

When Senna tested an indycar


Paul Tracy was in pole position for a full-time drive with Team Penske for the 1993 Indycar season. But when he arrived for a test at Firebird International Raceway in December '92, he still didn't have the deal confirmed.

Just days earlier the legendary Rick Mears had announced his retirement from the cockpit at the Penske Christmas party, so Tracy, who had raced Mears's car on occasions in '92 as part of a schedule that took in 11 of the 16 events, was optimistic. Then two limousines arrived at Firebird, and out stepped Formula 1 world champion royalty.

"I was already in the car - the test had already started," says Tracy today. "I'm in the pits and I see these limos show up outside the track. They had to open the gate for them to come across, and I thought it was weird. Then out of the limos come Emerson Fittipaldi and Ayrton Senna.

"Senna had a helmet bag with him and I thought, 'Oh Jesus, here we go'. They had another car and pulled it out of the truck ready to run. I was on eggshells because I hadn't been told I was going to run the full season - I was the test driver doing a partial season. There were all these rumours that Senna was going to sign with Penske and I was waiting to find out if I was going to get the seat or not."

Senna spent that off-season disillusioned with F1, where his once-dominant McLaren team was becoming less competitive in the face of fierce competition from Williams as high-tech cars - in the Brazilian's eyes - took away from the level of skill required from the driver.

To make matters worse McLaren had lost Honda power for 1993, and would be using Ford engines that would be a step behind those supplied to the Blue Oval's works partner Benetton. Without a McLaren deal in place for '93 yet, and in the wake of world champion Nigel Mansell's shock move from F1 to Indycars with Newman/Haas Racing, Senna turned to countryman, friend and Penske driver Fittipaldi to arrange a test.



"Emerson called me and asked if Ayrton could have a ride and I said absolutely," says team boss Roger Penske, who adds that Senna "had some interest in running the Indy 500". Sound familiar? Penske acknowledges that "Michael Andretti is doing a great job taking on Fernando Alonso this year at the last minute", a decision his team didn't quite have to make following Senna's test.

"You saw these Formula 1 guys have an interest coming to the Indianapolis 500. They looked at it as another big race. Of course, today, when you think of the number of people [in attendance] it's the world's number-one race. To have some of these stars come over and participate makes the competition better and, if you win, an even better trophy to have."

While Mansell's Newman/Haas deal was already in place by December of 1992, the newly crowned F1 world champion hadn't driven an Indycar yet, so the Penske crew took great satisfaction in stirring the pot when word started to get out about Senna's run.

"The high point of the day was a call I got from Ed Nathman, who was running Newman/Haas at the time," says former Penske team manager Chuck Sprague. "The grapevine was in full swing. He heard Senna was out there. Mansell hadn't even been in a car and here was Senna driving for us with no warning from anybody that it was happening.

"Personally, I took a lot of glee out of this because there had been a whole lot of media attention to Mansell's coming, but Senna was going to be in one first. We knew it was going to set the fox among the hens when it came to the rumour mill."

While Penske took pride in keeping the test under wraps - much like the secrecy that would surround the famous Mercedes-badged Ilmor pushrod engine with which it would dominate the 1994 Indy 500 - Sprague did have to keep a lid on things when his crew found some suspicious cargo in one of their cars as they unpacked the trucks at Firebird.



"As the guys were unloading the new car they pulled the bag out of the cockpit that had all of Senna's [1992 McLaren F1] gear in it so the questions started to flow," he adds. "I informed them, just as I had been told, we were doing this as a favour to Ayrton and there was nothing definitive one way or another."

The primary purpose for Penske at the test was to see how its 1993 car compared to the '92 machine, and it was a version of the latter that was made available to Senna. Mears started life in retirement as a consultant and driver coach for the team, although he accepts that he didn't have to do much on that day.

"You could tell immediately he was ahead of the car, even though it was a car he had never been in," says Mears. "I remember watching him come onto the front straightaway in a semi-tight right-hander. He started hustling it and it stepped out on him. Usually, guys that are new to a car, when it steps out like that and they catch it, they overcorrect it and they have a 'tankslapper', they chase it for a few wobbles, straighten it out and go on.

"He did the 'good-driver' thing: it stepped out, he did what he needed to do to stop it, kept it in a nice, smooth drift and feathered it out on the exit like he had done it 100 times. Obviously, he didn't need to prove anything to me, but when you see that it reconfirms his talent.

"He was a nice guy, level-headed and quiet. It was all about business. I remember him talking about driving the car and [in F1] they were already into the active ride and paddle-shifting and he said, 'This is fun. I get to drive the car again.' That's what a driver wants to do.

"I thought it was him wanting to branch out a little bit. A driver wants to drive anything. It's like when I had my test in the Brabham F1 car [in 1980, before turning down a contract from then-team boss Bernie Ecclestone] - it satisfied the curiosity in my mind that if that was the direction I wanted to go we should be competitive. Ayrton wanted the opportunity to see what it felt like."



Even after one run of roughly 15 laps in the car, Senna's feedback suggested there was more to this than simply wanting to satisfy a curiosity about Indycars.

"The debrief was fascinating to me because he identified the strengths and weaknesses to me that we had been dealing with all season," says Sprague. "I remember some initial hesitation at turn-in before the car would react.

"He was very complimentary of the brakes and we had a really comprehensive brake programme to make sure we could put good brakes under Rick, because with his feet [Mears had badly injured them in a crash in 1984] there was a loss of strength and loss of sensitivity that made it tougher for him to modulate brakes, because those were heavy cars.

"It was good feedback. He enjoyed manual shifting and said that it was a well-balanced car overall. Immediately, Ayrton was comfortable and hooked-up in the car - just what you would expect from a guy with those credentials."

Then-Penske crew chief Rick Rinaman was another to be blown away by the level of feedback Senna could offer so quickly.

"The main thing that I remember is when he did his run he came in and was able to tell us when the aerodynamics of the car stopped performing, at what point, slowing down for a turn," Rinaman remembers. "It was pretty amazing, something that we hadn't heard too often.

"It wasn't where the wings gave up but he could tell you when the underwing stopped working. He could differentiate it from the [top-surface] wing downforce. That was amazing."



By this time, word was already getting out about the test, with Arie Luyendyk making an appearance "hanging on the fence", according to Sprague, trying to find out what Senna was up to with Penske. But even if the test itself was creating fanfare, the team was impressed by how understated Senna was throughout, even down to the fact that he arrived with "no entourage".

Rinaman had been tasked with getting Senna properly fitted into the car and, despite being prepared to make a series of adjustments once Fittipaldi had shaken the car down, he wasn't called into action to make any changes when swapping one Brazilian for another.

"Senna came out and we had to do a driver fit because Emerson was taller," he says. "I remember he sat down in that seat and I'm looking at the footwell and he is toeing to get to the throttle and the brake. He either needed the pedals moved back to him or the seat moved up. He said it was fine.

"He was flopping around in the seat and I thought we would get padding for him. He was, 'No, this will work'. He went out in that car in the same driver fit as Emerson and had to stretch his foot to get to the throttle.

"All the drivers I've ever worked with if they are an inch uncomfortable it's a major deal, like moving the seat back or cutting the steering down. He jumped in the thing and drove."



Senna ended the day with a best lap of 49.09 seconds, 0.61s faster than Fittipaldi managed on his shakedown run, while Fittipaldi's best time in the 1993 car was a 48.5s. He stayed with the team for a few days, including spectating as it carried out an oval test at Phoenix. Sprague tried to get him to "give it a whirl", but Senna declined, saying, "I want to watch a lot more before I try this."

Before he left, Senna personally thanked each member of the Penske crew for his Firebird test, and Sprague was touched a year later to receive a Christmas card from the three-time world champion, which he has kept to this day. "You could see an underlying intensity that makes a driver successful," he adds. "He was coming off a season that tried his patience at McLaren.

"Clearly, Ayrton was one of the very, very best. It was a treat to be able to work with him a bit and see him in action, particularly when you throw him in the deep end. To me that is the acid test: here is a track you've never seen, a car you've never been in - go!"

Nothing more came of the test (much to Tracy's relief), with Senna eventually agreeing to start the 1993 F1 season on a race-by-race deal with McLaren, where he did his best to take the fight to the superior Williams-Renaults, now led by his arch nemesis Alain Prost. Mansell took Indycars by storm, winning on his debut at Surfers Paradise and defeating Fittipaldi in the battle for the championship. But how close did Penske come to running two Brazilians that year?

"You never know - we had a lot of drivers at that point and it's not easy to click it on and off," says Penske, who had ordered Sprague to put together a basic one-page contract for the test, that allowed Senna to turn up "at his determination".

"To have Senna drive one of our cars was a special day," the legendary team boss adds. "He was up to speed right away and was a terrific young man. He had a great feel of the car - the feedback was good, and the test was a success.

"We were so happy to have him in our car when we did. It's just a shame he never got to drive for us."

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How I wish he went to Indycar - would of been better for Penske, Senna and Motor sport world wide.

[TJ]

21 Years ago today -

https://youtu.be/auBSAYftkU0 - 6.30 in if you want to see the accident.

Scott Brayton, qualifies on pole, then dies in final practice before the race.

In the mid 1990's, Indycar split into two different series (IRL - Indy racing league and CART - Championship Auto Racing Teams) - CART was covered on TV in Aus, IRL wasn't, so didn't find out about this until years down the track.

[dmanvan]

Ed Carpenter has set the pace on a day of limited running at a windy Indianapolis, as Fernando Alonso finished Practice 3 fourth fastest.

On the slowest of the three days of practice thus far, Carpenter lapped Indianapolis Motor Speedway in a time of 40.3779s (222.894mph, 358.713km/h) just as the clock ticked over to the final hour.

The #20 Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet just pipped Scott Dixon’s best effort in the Kiwi’s Chip Ganassi Honda, set halfway through the piece, while JR Hildebrand made it both ECR cars in the top three.

Alonso improved twice in the final hour in his McLaren/Andretti Autosport Honda to finish fourth.

With wind gusting over 20mph (32.2km/h), conditions which Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Graham Rahal described on his radio as “stupid,” just 14 of the 33 drivers set representative lap times.






Only Josef Newgarden ventured onto the track in a Team Penske Chevrolet, with Will Power, Simon Pagenaud, Helio Castroneves, and Juan Pablo Montoya all sitting out the six-hour session.

Practice 4 starts on Friday morning at 0200 AEST, while qualifying commences on Saturday (local time)

ref: http://www.speedcafe.com/2017/05/18/carpenter-fastest-alonso-fourth-practice-3/


----nice

[TJ]

Chev are accusing Honda of being too fast and wanting some sort of parity adjustment..

Honda's response.

https://twitter.com/DanLayton3/status/864946091061649412

[dmanvan]

Chev are accusing Honda of being too fast and wanting some sort of parity adjustment..

Honda's response.

https://twitter.com/DanLayton3/status/864946091061649412


lol... classic.... are honda doing that in F1:p

....

Following complaints their cars are too fast during Indy 500 practice, Honda engineers take delivery of a fresh round of sandbags @IMS

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DADnuY8XYAAq0Es.jpg

[TJ]

Alonso doesn't matter, right?


As per discussion w/ @IndyCar i've looked up the YouTube Indy 500 practice views: Best 2016 day: 76,041 Best 2017 day: 606,682 (+698%)

[p0630034]

But my 13 year old daughter doesn't know who Alonso is.

[TJ]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAOldujXcAAvraD.jpg

[TJ]

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/25bKrVM3H4k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Fernando's run

[TJ]

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2R7LtbJlqUQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Seb with a terrible hit. Seems to be ok

[dmanvan]

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2R7LtbJlqUQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Seb with a terrible hit. Seems to be ok that vid seems to have been removed now...:( ...

if you mean by OK that he is alive, broken pelvis (multiple fract) and right hip, ouch .

He won't be back this year but seems to be positive post surgery...



And the 'rookie' goes to 5th for qual.....:rolleyes:

[TJ]

Sato - like always on the ragged edge - brushes the wall twice.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7PDXTEk4uUc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[TJ]

http://fox59.com/2017/05/22/pole-winner-scott-dixon-dario-franchitti-robbed-at-gunpoint-in-speedway-taco-bell-drive-thru/

Will pole, get robbed.

Murrica

[TJ]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAdewYrW0AAp6Z7.jpg

Sébastien Bourdais‏ @BourdaisOnTrack 9m9 minutes ago

I'm not going to go for a run tomorrow, but I'm up! Thank you all for your support!

[TJ]

Fucking Ron - Autosport plus


The idea of a car bearing the word 'McLaren' on orange-liveried flanks racing in this year's Indianapolis 500 would have sounded preposterous a little more than a month ago. The prospect of the same Formula 1 team competing at the Brickyard 30 years ago would have seemed just as ridiculous.

Yet there was a plan for McLaren to race Indycars full-time in the mid-1980s in a different hue of orange - the familiar lurid orange-and-white of Marlboro.

The plan belonged to Marlboro parent Philip Morris rather than McLaren. Its representatives in both the US and Europe spent considerable time and effort through 1985 trying to persuade a team that had dominated F1 with Niki Lauda and Alain Prost in '84 to double up on its racing programme and enter the CART Indycar series in '86.

Marlboro was making its first significant steps into the CART arena in 1985. It had renewed its relationship with Emerson Fittipaldi, the driver who had brought the cigarette brand to McLaren 11 years before.

There were also further personal sponsorship deals with Danny Sullivan and Al Unser Jr under the 'Marlboro World Championship Team' banner that will be familiar to anyone with a collection of Marlboro F1 event stickers. Bruno Giacomelli, who completed a limited CART programme with Patrick Racing that season, had a separate deal with Philip Morris International in Europe that had carried on from his days in F1.

The company's plan was to ramp up big-time in 1986. The Marlboro Pole Position Award came on stream, eventually helping to spawn the end-of-season Marlboro Challenge non-championship race run from 1987 until '92. But central to the ambitions of Philip Morris was getting its colours on the side of a car in the series. And who better to run it than McLaren?



It would have been a natural call, and not only because McLaren was riding the crest of a wave after taking both the F1 drivers' and constructors' titles in 1984. The team, albeit in a previous incarnation, had Indycar form.

Its chassis had taken a trio of Indy 500 victories in the 1970s, and it was the team's US operation that had kept McLaren solvent in the early '70s before Fittipaldi arrived with Marlboro's millions. It had effectively subsidised the F1 team until that point.

McLaren technical director John Barnard was also no stranger to Indycars. He'd spent five years across the Atlantic, designing first the race-winning Parnelli-Cosworth VPJ6 in the United States Automobile Club era and then the Chaparral 2K that went on to dominate the second season of the new CART series in 1980 with ex-McLaren driver Johnny Rutherford (Barnard had left by then after a dispute with Chaparral boss Jim Hall over who should be given credit for the design).

The initial discussions designed to take McLaren Stateside were set up by John Hogan, who ran Philip Morris International's sponsorship operations from Lausanne in Switzerland.

"I was privy to it and instrumental in it," says the man who four and a half years earlier had brokered the deal for McLaren to merge with Ron Dennis's Project 4 Racing squad, which had been gearing up for an F1 entry with a Barnard design.

"The 1984 season was a seminal one for McLaren and Marlboro. We had hit the ground running with the TAG turbo engine after years of disaster and the thinking in North America was, 'Why can't we do that here?'



"Philip Morris in Europe was asked to review the proposition of getting McLaren involved in Indycar racing. I was being politically ambitious in that I could see a bigger slice of the cake within Philip Morris coming into my department. I was all for it."

The first meeting about the potential Indycar programme took place in Woking in March 1985. Present were former Long Beach Grand Prix marketing boss Brian Turner, who had been retained as a consultant by Philip Morris USA, and Hogan. Their recollections of that meeting are very different, however.

"Ron didn't seem very excited about the plan and ummed and ahhed about it and finally agreed that he'd do a proposal, which he put to us in New York in July," says Turner.

Hogan, conversely, says that the then-McLaren boss was keen on the idea.

"Ron's initial reaction was to say yes - he was very positive," he recalls. "He spieled the spiel and said they could run a March chassis in the first year, tidy it up and make it better, and then come with their own car in 1987."

Dennis did put a proper proposal forward in July, but it wasn't what the Marlboro men had been hoping for.

Internal Philip Morris USA documents, freely available from the University of California, San Francisco 'Truth Tobacco' legacy library, reveal that Dennis had backed away from the idea of running a customer chassis in year one of the programme.

"A formal presentation was held on July 30, at which time McLaren proposed a two-year association with the objective of having a competitive Marlboro entry in CART in 1987," reads the memorandum dated September 4 1985.

"This one-year delay is based upon both technical and political issues, which must be overcome before McLaren can realistically compete with a purpose-made engine and car."



The Philip Morris strategy called for a car to be up and running in Marlboro colours in 1986. McLaren was asked to reconsider, but at a subsequent meeting at the end of August reiterated its position.

The team believed, according to the document, that "a 1986 McLaren effort in CART using a 'kit-car' [ie a March or Lola] would be detrimental to their company and counterproductive to their future involvement in CART".

Philip Morris therefore began to make alternative arrangements and agreed a deal with Patrick Racing to sponsor Fittipaldi's car from 1986. It had an option with the team that had to be taken up by September 30, but less than two weeks before that Dennis got back in contact asking if he could again pursue the idea of joining the CART ranks in '86.

The documents from the legacy library suggest that senior Philip Morris executives were waiting by the phone in a New York office on October 10 for a call from Dennis to confirm that the 1986 plan was on. The phone never rang. Instead a telex arrived calling the whole thing off.

Hogan believes that Barnard, ever the perfectionist, ultimately scuppered McLaren's expansion into Indycar racing.

"John was hostile to the whole idea; he did not want to do it," he says. "He didn't want to run someone else's car in year one and was only interested in doing a full-carbon car like the F1, and the regulations didn't allow that [and wouldn't until 1991]."

Getting McLaren's side of the story is nigh-on impossible. Dennis's office didn't reply to Autosport's requests for an interview (he declines, as a rule, to talk about the past) and Barnard has absolutely no recollection of Marlboro's plans. He is insistent that Dennis never discussed it with him. But he does say that he would have been against it. Hostile, in fact, just as Hogan says.

"I have a take on this, which is that Ron would have known that I was anti doing anything outside of F1 at that time," Barnard explains. "We had a few people come along talking about road cars and this and that, and I always resisted. Firstly, we just didn't have the capacity and, secondly, Ron and I couldn't divert our attention away from F1."



Barnard points out that McLaren at the time would have been incapable of undertaking a second project without a significant expansion.

"Don't forget that we won the 1984 championship with Niki with a total staff of, I think, 74 people," he explains. "I remember that because there is a big picture somewhere of everyone lined up in Boundary Road [the team's factory location at that time] for the cameras. The design office was six people and me.

"We would've had to bring in a new group and I knew good people over in America from my time there. But I would've been in charge of the design group, so it would still have been a distraction."

Put it to Barnard that Dennis might not have told him of the Marlboro approach for fear of his reaction, and he replies: "I wasn't known for my subtlety, let's put it this way, so the answer is probably yes."

Dennis wouldn't have been obliged to tell Barnard. McLaren's technical director had sold his 40% stake in the company to Mansour Ojjeh, who had previously funded development of the Porsche-built TAG twin-turbo V6, at the end of 1984. "If you ask me why I did it, I can't tell you," he says. "I decided that I wanted to get rid of my shareholding, cash it in if you like."

Barnard does, however, remember an earlier approach for McLaren to build an Indycar. It came from his old employers Vel Miletich and Parnelli Jones. It, too, was rebuffed.

"It must have been 1982, possibly '83, and I remember Ron booking a meeting room at a hotel at Heathrow," recalls Barnard. "We had the talks, but Ron said, 'I don't think this is right for us.' That's as far as it went. Vel was a great big guy and Parnelli a crazy, bull-necked ex-driver. I don't think they were Ron's kind of people."


The surprise telex from Dennis forced Philip Morris to go back to the drawing board and back to Patrick. The problem was the team had already signed a deal for Fittipaldi to be sponsored in 1986 by 7-Eleven after Marlboro failed to take up its option. Kevin Cogan was to be the team's second driver, but Philip Morris didn't want him: it wanted the driver who'd given Marlboro its first F1 world title in 1974.

"I had to go back to Patrick and buy out Emerson's contract with 7-Eleven," recalls Turner. "He ended up racing the Marlboro car and Cogan drove the 7-Eleven car."

Fittipaldi continued to win races with Patrick, now with his March decked out in Marlboro colours and powered by a Chevrolet engine, in 1986. A switch to a Penske chassis in '89 yielded the Indy 500 and CART title double. That was also the first season that a Penske-run car appeared in Marlboro livery, on Al Unser Sr's car at the Indy 500.

Philip Morris got on board with Penske full-time the following season and didn't do too badly in both CART and the IndyCar Series before tobacco sponsorship was outlawed, while in F1 McLaren and Marlboro continued racking up world titles.

They were won with and then without Barnard, and without the distraction of a second racing programme on the other side of the pond.

[TJ]

Super smart



McLaren is not charging its sponsors any extra for their involvement with Fernando Alonso's Indianapolis 500 programme, in part due to its troubled Formula 1 fortunes.

Alonso's Andretti Autosport-run Dallara-Honda is almost entirely bedecked in McLaren's traditional orange and covered with stickers representing the team's partners.

Executive director Zak Brown said the outfit felt offering that branding without additional cost helped offset the exposure lost through McLaren-Honda's on-track struggles in F1.

"It's something we're doing as part of our larger motor racing programme, to deliver for our partners," he said.

"It isn't anything we have charged them incrementally for.

"As good partners, you need to recognise when you're delivering and when you are not and we're not delivering on track, which directly impacts their exposure.

"So this is a great way to offset that loss of exposure we are generating now with a tremendous amount of exposure.

"We felt that was the right thing to do.

"Commercially, it's to make sure we deliver to our partners the exposure we promised."

Alonso will line up fifth for his maiden Indy 500 attempt on Sunday, hours after Jenson Button contests the Monaco Grand Prix as his replacement.

Brown said F1's new owner supports Alonso's IndyCar bid, despite the double world champion missing the blue-ribband grand prix.



"They like it," he said. "I was just with [Liberty Media CEO] Greg Maffei, and he thinks it is super cool.

"I think it's such a good story, it generates great exposure for everyone.

"In reality, we're not in the zone where people are showing up to watch McLaren race right now.

"I think the fact we brought Jenson back is a bigger story than had we just continued to run our two drivers.

"It's created a massive story in America and it's created an additional talking point here.

"I don't think we've sacrificed that much because we're here to win races and Jenson was on it right away.

"We want to get in the points here and at the same time have a successful Indy 500 so we come out with three great results instead of two."

[dmanvan]

Also - on live on Foxtel

And a plethora of illegal streams


for paupers like me that dont have fox.... cause pinty's chicken is the best....

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsFrHgeo1ESWlnc4hISXuIQ/live

hope it stays up.. :p

[dmanvan]

still up..... go rookie....,,,, smooth at the moment... :)

[TJ]

Wow Scott Dixon

[dmanvan]

Wow Scott Dixon... yes, wowowo ... massive, photographer nearly ate it too

[TJ]

What a race - a must watch if you like motorsports.

[tinto]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s69XiUdzbWg