Auto Racing?

Brasilians tend to be into auto racing, especially Formula 1, because there are many excellent drivers all throughout F1 and IndyCar.  I remember how F1 was so foreign here, and there were no brasilians piloting Indy cars.  There are more brasilians in Indy now than F1 (5 vs 3 if I counted correctly) including one of their top drivers Helio Castro-Neves who races for Team Penske, on of the big teams in autoracing.

It was a struggle to catch the races back in the day.  They were on at ungodly hours.   But ESPN was a godsend, and today Speed and Versus are the place to go.  You can spend all weekend watching motor races these days: F1, Indy, Nascar, Rolex, Rally, Endurance, MotoGP, motocross.   I have spent too much time watching the stuff, but you’ll be amazed at how much you can learn.  The different network programs do a great job of educating the viewers, and they love to talk data!  It’s incredible how much racing has grown.  I see go-kart racing in my future.   (If anybody, Google for example, is interested in sponsoring a team let me know.  The Google campus would be a great place for development and a track)

Fox carried the Turkish GP this past weekend.  It was great to hear the commentators psyche up the American audience for a standing start ‘a tradition in F1′, and the starting system of lights (as opposed to the green flag).

You would be amazed at how much is going on in F1.  Their governing body, the F1A, will be imposing budget caps of $60MM starting in the 2010 season.  Ferrari probably spends close to $500MM on their program.  Today the court threw out Ferrari’s bid to block the caps.  Ferrari, Renaut, and Toyota are all threatening to bow out of next season, and Friday, June 12, is the deaddline to enter 2010.

The 2009 season itself is in tumult.  Wunderkind Lewis Hamilton of McLaren-Mercedes super-team can’t win a race (tied for 10th) this year, and his teammate is lower still in the standings.  Ferrari has one driver in the top 10, the brasilian Felipe Massa.  The top 2 positions are from a team that has risen from the near-ashes of the Honda F1 team, saved at the last minute by Honda F1 Racing Team’s ex-technical director Ross Brawn.  Their top driver, Jenson Button, is only second to the great ex-F1 pilot Michael Schumacher in performance at the beginning of the season – in the first 7 races, Jenson has 6 victories and one third place, Michael had 6 victories and one second place. Jenson is no rookie, and has toughed it out over 10 long years with very little success.  He was 18th in 2008 with 3 points.  15th in 2007 with 6.

I’ll watch all kinds of racing.  But #2 for me would be endurance races, the kind with many classes,  GP2, GP1, LP1 and 2, prototype cars, Le Mans, Watkins Glen, Sebring.  A close 3rd is rally racing, those guys are nuts.

Who needs brasilian soap operas when you have this, and futebol?

Only question for me is, where am I going to find the time?