IndyCar has upheld Ryan Hunter-Reay’s controversial win at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway on August 14 by denying the protests made by Newman/Haas and Target/Chip Ganassi Racing. The top three finishing positions in the race remain the same and are now official, with Hunter-Reay having won from Oriol Servia and Scott Dixon.

The protests were issued after the rain-affected race ended in acrimony. Following a late restart called by IndyCar senior official Brian Barnhart, a multi-car crash in slippery conditions eliminated title contender Will Power among others. The race was red-flagged and the results were reset prior to the restart, handing Hunter-Reay the win. But following the restart he had been passed by Newman/Haas driver Servia and Ganassi’s Dixon, hence their challenge.

Servia, Hunter-Reay and Dixon at New Hampshire

The hearing was held on Tuesday before a three-man panel comprising New Hampshire Motor Speedway general manager Jerry Gappens and experienced USAC officials Rollie Helmling and Jeff Stoops. They issued a statement which said: “After hearing the presentations by each participant, the Protest Panel was unanimous in its decision. It is this panel’s conclusion that IndyCar senior official Brian Barnhart had the authority under the governing 2011 IZOD IndyCar Series rulebook to render the decision that was made. We also agree that his decision to abort the restart and set the finishing positions that existed before the attempted restart to be an exercise of reasonable discretion. The protests as to Chip Ganassi Racing Teams Inc car number nine and Newman/Haas Racing car number two are hereby denied.”

“We are very pleased with the decision given by the committee on the New Hampshire race,” said Andretti Autosport team owner Michael Andretti. “Ryan drove a tremendous race at Loudon and his crew was outstanding that day. We believed all along that Ryan was the winner and this decision verifies his victory. We have two big road racing events coming up in the next two weeks at Sonoma and Baltimore, and we can now focus on getting back to victory lane at those races.”

Hunter-Reay added: “I have always felt that we won the race in New Hampshire. The conditions were not ideal that day, and a proper decision needed to be made. I know that the entire Andretti Autosport team is pleased with the outcome of the hearing. It is a relief to now concentrate on the next race at Sonoma. We have scored more points in the last four races than any other driver, and I would love to continue that pattern at Infineon Raceway.”

Hunter-Reay and Servia jostle for position on a restart

On the losing side, a philosophic Carl Haas said: “We feel we gave the panel proof that Oriol was the winner when the chequered flag ended the race. Naturally we are disappointed in the panel’s ruling that five laps of the race be struck from the results, but we appreciated the opportunity to state our position.”

And Servia added: “I am proud of Newman/Haas Racing and how they proved that the restart procedure was correct and that we were leading when the yellow came out. The panel doesn’t deny that. Their resolution states that Brian Barnhart has the power by the rulebook to make certain decisions at his discretion, and that is what happened.”

On Wednesday Chip Ganassi said he had not decided if his team would appeal the decision in the limited time available. “Everything the chief steward did might well be within his power, but is that the right thing for the sport? There’s a fine line between what constitutes the legality of a chief steward’s decisions and the integrity of the sport.”

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Back in 1979 Keke Rosberg was an eager young star, racing in both Formula 1 and the ‘new era’ Can-Am in America. Rosberg broke into F1 in 1978 driving various races for the Theodore, Wolf and ATS teams. In ‘79 he drove for Wolf through the second half of the year after James Hunt decided to quit mid-season. But at the start of ‘79 Keke had nothing in F1 and was committed to racing in the States in one of Paul Newman’s Lola-based Spyder Can-Am cars.

The Spyder was fast but fragile and burned up its front tyres. Rosberg won the season-opener at Road Atlanta and again at Watkins Glen in mid-summer. He also finished second to that year’s World Champion Alan Jones in Carl Haas’s Lola after a fierce battle at Mid-Ohio. But there were almost as many crashes.

“I had a bad year,” Keke recalls. “I was often very fast but I kept blowing front tyres. I pushed the fronts too hard, but they didn’t warn you. It just burst. It was the shoulder that went all the time. I had a huge shunt at Willow Springs in testing. I went about three miles across the desert in a cloud of dust.

“I had another big one at Laguna Seca. My first lap of qualifying was good, but not quite good enough. My brain said you should not do a second lap, but my heart said, ‘Go for it.’ And the right front tyre burst in turn one.

“In those days there was an earth bank and nothing else, and I hit the bank very, very hard in a Lola tub. The Lola limp was one of the best-known illnesses among racing drivers and I was lucky I didn’t break my legs. In fact, I didn’t break anything. But boy, was I messed up!

“It was a huge shunt. I had a girlfriend who used to fly for American Airlines and she nursed me that night because I was completely gone.

“When we did the warm-up on Sunday morning we taped my gloves to the steering wheel because I had no strength in my hands. I drove the warm-up in the spare car but I was so dizzy and felt so bad that I went straight back to the hotel and lay down for three hours. Then I came back and drove the race.

“I was running very strong. I think I was fourth, but of course I didn’t know where I was. I’d run out of brakes and was just not all there, and I didn’t have the strength to catch a slide out of the last turn. I spun and stalled the thing.”

Rosberg struggled home in sixth place a lap down and then recuperated in LA before the season-closer at Riverside. “My friend Mike Brockman took me to Los Angeles and I laid in his bed for nearly two weeks. I was so bad he came back from the office every day at lunchtime to feed me.”

At Riverside Keke put on quite a show, leading at one point but tearing off a bunch of bodywork after a collision with Geoff Lees. “I hit Geoff and took half the bodywork off, which wasn’t a problem. I was leading but Haas protested, so they black-flagged me. Otherwise I would have won that one, bodywork or no bodywork. That was the attitude in those days. As long as there were wheels on the car we would keep on driving.

“There were some good people in Can-Am in those days. Gilles [Villeneuve] came in and out, and Bobby Rahal was there and Price Cobb too, as well as guys like Jones and Jacky Ickx. It was a good time. But the tracks were so dangerous! The cars were very fast and the tracks were bad and it was a bad combination. At Watkins Glen you looked at the Armco and you didn’t want to think about it. It was a different time.”

Sometimes we forget how different.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Last week I had the great pleasure of travelling to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin to speak at a fund-raising dinner in aid of the late, great Paul Newman’s Victory Junction ‘Hole in the Wall Gang’ camps. Elkhart Lake village is home to the Road America circuit, renowned as the USA’s finest road course. The spectacular four-mile circuit was opened in 1955 and remains essentially unchanged today without a single dreadful chicane or other modern encumbrance to disfigure the original layout. For true racers, Road America is manna from heaven.

These days Road America hosts the SCCA’s annual Run-Offs, which features 26 races to determine the country’s national champions in a variety of amateur racing classes, from Formula Vee to GT2-type Corvettes. It’s the perfect venue to stage a Hole in the Wall Gang fund-raiser because among the many facets of his richly diverse character Newman was a passionate amateur road racer and multiple SCCA champion.

The dinner takes place at Siebkens Resort, a vintage lakeside hotel in the centre of Elkhart Lake. It is organised by Laura Cooper who worked for many years with Newman/Haas Racing’s hospitality maestros Peter and Mary-Lin Murphy. David Hobbs was the guest speaker for last year’s inaugural Hole in the Wall Gang fund-raiser, and ‘Coop’ was good enough to invite me to speak this year. Over the past two years I’ve written the history of Carl Haas Auto and Newman/Haas Racing, and hope to publish the book next year. Coop asked me to read some excerpts from it and I did so with great pleasure, focusing on Messrs Newman and Haas’s love for Road America.

Back in 1951 Carl Haas witnessed his first motor race at Elkhart Lake and that event got him hooked on the sport that became his life. In those days the races took place on an open road circuit that ran through the village and around the local countryside surrounding the lake, a precursor to the track that was designed and built by local businessman and construction magnate Cliff Tufte. Many years later in 1979 Jacky Ickx won the third of four consecutive Can-Am championships for Carl’s team. Jacky won that year’s race at Road America and stayed at Siebkens.

“I never felt so happy than staying at Siebkens that year,” grins Ickx. “It was real American pie. What a place! Elkhart Lake was lovely. It was beautiful, nice, incredible! For me, it was a complete pleasure.”

And for many others too. A visit to Road America and a few days at Siebkens always stand out as the highlight of any year and I want to thank Coop for organising a great event in memory of the finest man I’ve met, not only in racing but also in life. It was a rare pleasure to be introduced by my old friend Peter Murphy and to see so many familiar faces in the audience. A silent auction followed the dinner and it was highly successful.

I’m sure that up there where he resides forever on the grand dais with the world’s most accomplished people Newman wore a blue-eyed grin throughout the evening. It was a tremendous pleasure to contribute in a small way to the man’s continuing philanthropic efforts on behalf of poor and disadvantaged children around the world.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

A few days after Christmas I had the pleasure of talking to Jacky Ickx for a book I’m writing about the history of Carl Haas and Newman/Haas Racing. Thirty years ago Ickx won the Can-Am championship driving a Lola for Haas’s team, and I wanted to talk to him about his 1979 season in America. Jacky celebrated his 65th birthday on New Year’s Day and he’s not only one of the most accomplished racing drivers but also a delightful, old school gentleman.

Ickx is proud that, much like Mario Andretti, he won races across a broad range of categories. Jacky won Le Mans six times, of course, but he also won 37 World Championship long-distance sports car races – more than any other driver – and two world sports car titles in 1982-83.

Ickx won sports car races driving Gulf Ford GT40s, factory Porsches, Ferraris and Mirages, and came to be celebrated as a maestro of Le Mans and endurance racing.

He also finished second to Jackie Stewart in the 1969 Formula 1 World Championship and was second again the following year to Jochen Rindt. He won eight Grands Prix between 1968-72 driving for Brabham and Ferrari, and claimed the European F2 championship in 1967 when he was just 22. Jacky retired from racing sports cars in 1985 but continued to compete in the Paris-Dakar rally until 1992, having won the gruelling event in ’83. “I had a career that was similar to Mario in a way because Mario did all kinds of racing successfully,” says Ickx. “He could go from a dirt track, to Indy, to long-distance racing or F1, and whatever he did he could do it well. And that’s what I did, too.”

Jacky says that over the years he’s gained a deeper appreciation for the people and teamwork that makes the sport happen. “When you’re older you don’t see things the way you did when you were a kid,” he says. “It’s a very individual sport and a selfish sport too for the drivers, and it takes time to understand that you don’t do anything without a large number of people – the engineers and mechanics and so on – who are working in the shadows with a lot of motivation and passion. Your success depends on their abilities and goodwill. They do their jobs with pleasure, but the only rewards they receive is when their driver wins.”

Jacky is also aware how lucky he’s been and how much richer his life has been made by racing. “In sport, your career is reasonably short,” he says. “Mine started when I was 16 in 1960 and I stopped in 1992. So it was very long and I was extremely lucky to survive 30 years of motor racing in those days. Today, when I meet Jackie Stewart or Carlos Reutemann or some people from that era, the first thing we say is how lucky we’ve been to survive such a big amount of racing miles in F1, long-distance racing, Can-Am, the Paris-Dakar and everything else without losing a wheel or having a major technical problem. It’s a miracle!

“That is why every day when I wake up I feel lucky. It’s also why I pay more attention to the human side than the score. To me, the score is not important – the fact that I won Le Mans six times, or that I won 50 long-distance races, the F2 championship or Paris-Dakar. What counts are the outstanding people I had the chance to meet.”

Jacky is also a devoted Motor Sport reader. “It’s the only racing magazine I buy,” he says. “You guys are doing a great job. Keep it up!”

Thanks for the compliment Jacky. Keep reading and we’ll keep writing.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

The opening weekend of qualifying for this year’s 92nd Indianapolis 500 takes place this weekend. Favourites for the pole must be Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon who have been the men to beat on oval tracks so far this year in Chip Ganassi’s pair of Dallara-Hondas. Other pole contenders include 2001 and ‘02 race winner Helio Castroneves and new team-mate Ryan Briscoe with Team Penske, and Tony Kanaan, Marco Andretti (above) and Danica Patrick (below) at Andretti-Green Racing.

Thanks to the unification of IndyCar racing thirty-four drivers are entered at Indianapolis this year and the field is a little stronger than in recent years. On the other hand, the previous two winners Dario Franchitti and Sam Hornish are missing from the field as they have moved their careers, for better or worse, to NASCAR. The only previous winners entered this year are Wheldon, Castroneves and Buddies Rice and Lazier.

Five Brits are entered – 2005 winner Wheldon, Darren Manning, Justin Wilson, Jay Howard and Alex Lloyd. Wilson, Howard and Lloyd are rookies, although Wilson has some oval experience from his four years in Champ Car and is the number one driver of course, at Newman/Haas/Lanigan, replacing Sebastien Bourdais in the team’s McDonald’s car.

This has been a tough week for Newman/Haas/Lanigan because the team’s most experienced and respected man Davey Evans was brutally murdered in an Indianapolis bar last Saturday night. Evans, 63, had worked for Carl Haas’s race team for forty years, going back to the original Can-Am and Formula 5000 series. Born in Sudbury-on-Thames, Evans started his working life in 1959 as a teen-aged engineering apprentice with HWM Motors. He moved on to Maranello Concessionaires before finding work at Lola Cars and then becoming a key man in America in Haas’s Can-Am and Formula 5000 teams before the creation in 1983 of the Newman/Haas CART team.

For many years Davey worked at Lola during the winters building Haas’s cars. Evans was an old-school artisan who could construct almost anything. He was not only Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing’s most experienced crewman, but also probably the longest-serving man in the contemporary IndyCar garage area.

“I have a tough time accepting it and I’m sure everyone else feels the same way,” Mario Andretti commented. “It’s such a waste of a wonderful life. For some meaningless human being to take another life that meant so much is a total travesty. There are very few people that I’ve known in my life who you could say, ‘I don’t think this guy had an enemy in the world.’ All the years that I’ve known and worked with him, whether it was with Carl’s Can-Am team or through Formula 5000 to all the years with Newman/Haas, Davey was always there with a smile, always kind. What can you say? He was a friend for life.”

Two memorial services were held in Indianapolis this week for Evans as many who knew him paid their respects to one of the sport’s most-liked men, fated to lose his life in deeply tragic circumstances.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

Last week, following Graham Rahal’s (above) inspired victory in his first IRL race in the streets of St Petersburg, team owner Carl Haas (below) was in the best spirits he’s been in for months. Like all the former Champ Car teams, Newman/Haas/Lanigan has been up to its elbows in a serious thrash over the past two months re-building old Dallara-Hondas or building new cars from parts. So it was particularly sweet for Champ Car’s most successful team to win in St Pete with its talented, teen-aged driver.

“Graham did a tremendous job and Justin (Wilson) (below) was very quick,” Haas said. “Justin had a real chance to win the thing, but he caught-out by the yellows and the pit strategy. It’s too bad because he was very quick.

“It was great for the team because everyone has really worked their tails off,” Haas added. “But there’s a lot to do. We’ve got two more cars to build before Indy next month and it’s going to be tough on the ovals. The top guys have got five or six years of running on us. It’s good to know we can run strong with these cars on a street circuit, but the ovals are completely different. We don’t have any data or information to work from.”

Haas said everyone in his team is delighted to be part of the IRL’s unified Indycar series. “It’s been very, very difficult for the teams from Champ Car to make the change in such a short period of time,” Haas acknowledged. “But people are really loving the fact that it’s just one series and we’re all racing together again. I think it’s going to be a lot better for Indycar racing. There was so much confusion. Nobody knew who was what and the whole thing lost all its identity. This unification had to happen and it’s going to be a good thing for the sport.”

But Haas has his reservations about next weekend’s Long Beach GP where the former Champ Car teams will give their Panoz-Cosworths one last hurrah while the IRL regulars are racing at Motegi in Japan. “I hope Long Beach works out,” Haas remarked. “It’s a terrible way to have to do it and I’m not sure how the people – the fans – are going to feel about it.”

We were assured last week that twenty cars will be on the grid at Long Beach, including former winner Jimmy Vasser. But four-time Long Beach winner Paul Tracy apparently will not be in the field as he struggles to resolve his contract dispute with Jerry Forsythe.

“As far as I know, I’m not driving,” Tracy said. “I’ve told the team that I’m more than happy to do Long Beach, but they don’t want to acknowledge there’s a termination clause in the contract. Nobody has told me anything.”

As Carl Haas says, it will be interesting to see how the fans react to Champ Car’s swansong in the streets of Long Beach next weekend.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

It was sad to talk last week with each of Derrick Walker (above), Paul Tracy (below) and Carl Haas. All three had tales of woe to tell about how the fallout from Champ Car’s demise has affected them. Walker’s team finds itself without the sponsorship to be able to race in this year’s unified IRL series, Tracy is out of a ride and has no idea what or even if he will race this year, and Haas admits to losing a pile of money on his investment in Panoz DP01 parts and equipment.

As everyone knows, Walker has lost his sponsor and driver Will Power to the renamed KV Racing Technology team and is going to court to attempt to get some restitution from Craig Gore. Walker has not laid-off any employees and will run three Atlantic cars this year but he’s looking at diversifying into the A1GP series or sports car racing or any other sensible form of motor sport that will pay the bills.

Meanwhile, Paul Tracy awaits word from Jerry Forsythe about how Tracy might buy his way out of his multi-year contract or find some other resolution to his dilemma. At the moment Tracy is a pedestrian, without a ride in the IRL. He’s assuming, but doesn’t know if he’ll race at Long Beach. “I feel like I’m standing on the platform and the train’s driving off,” Tracy remarked. “I feel like the guy who got a new suit for the big date and I’m primed and ready for the prom, and she didn’t show up.”

And then there’s Carl Haas (above), a proud man who, with his partner Paul Newman, built one of America’s most accomplished and respected race teams. Over half a century Haas has made his living entirely from racing, selling cars, parts and service to all kinds of formulas and categories. Haas admitted last week that he has lost more than two millions dollars on his investment in Champ Car’s failed Panoz spec-car project. Like Walker, Haas has remained loyal to his people and he has not laid-off any employees.

The good news is that Cristiano da Matta (above) enjoyed a very good first run in a race car last week since his near-fatal accident at Elkhart Lake in the summer of 2006. Da Matta tested one of Bob Stallings’ Gainsco Riley-Pontiac Grand-Am cars at the new 2.5-mile Eagles Canyon road circuit in Texas and after two days and around 140 laps Cristiano was bubbling with enthusiasm. Da Matta will make his return to racing at Laguna Seca in May, driving a second Stallings’ Grand-Am car beside series champions Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty. Da Matta will share his car with old friend and former team-mate Jimmy Vasser.

“It will be a good way to get back,” da Matta remarked. “I won’t be able to fight for the championship this year, but just to get back to it and next year be serious about the job of going for the championship, it’s very exciting. And to do it with Jimmy who is not only a very good driver but also a very good friend of mine – and he’s also very fired-up about it – it’s like a dream.”

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine