Maybe it was the full moon. Maybe it was the fact that 13 years had passed since Indycars last raced at the one-mile New Hampshire Motor Speedway. But the Izod IndyCar Series put on an action-packed race at the track with fierce competition and passing galore as well as a wild, much-disputed finish.

Ryan Hunter-Reay scored his first win of the year in Sunday’s race. He beat Oriol Servia and Scott Dixon, while championship rivals Dario Franchitti and Will Power were eliminated in separate accidents on restarts. Franchitti qualified on pole and dominated the first half of the race, running away on his own before he was hit by Takuma Sato on a restart, spinning into the wall. Sato later apologised to Franchitti, admitting he got too close to Dario (below) because he had some debris and tears in one eye.

Power was eliminated after Danica Patrick spun in front of him on a late-race restart in slippery conditions and registered his disgust with IndyCar officials by waving his arms and a pair of raised fingers at them. A gaggle of cars were involved in the collision, leading to a red flag. After a delay the stewards set the results to before the final restart, handing Hunter Reay the win. Power’s gesture was just a small part of a gale of disgruntled drivers and team owners seething in the pitlane at the end of the race. Servia and the Newman/Haas team disputed Hunter-Reay’s win, while everyone questioned the wisdom of the final, disastrous restart.

Third-placed Dixon said: “Obviously everybody’s a little confused with what went on during the day, but the racing was good. There was lots of passing. For me, at about lap 200 it felt like we were 500 miles in already. I thought it was a hell of a race.”

Hunter-Reay agreed: “Man, the racing was so difficult with the traffic. You had to time it just perfect. This track is a lot of fun. If I had it my way we’d be coming back here for many years to come. All the drivers really respect this place. They’ll tell you this is one of the toughest ovals they’ve been on in their life.”

IndyCar’s president of competition and racing operations Brian Barnhart (below) admitted he had erred in calling for the final restart. You have to tip your cap to Barnhart for his uncommon candour, remarkably unlike anything one might hear from the FIA.

“It was a challenging day for us from the get-go with the late start we had for television and knowing we had bad weather coming in,” said Barnhart. “Then we had to make some difficult calls from a race control point of view, when you have indecisiveness about what the weather is doing and whether you have safe conditions to continue racing. When it rains hard your decision is a pretty easy one to make, but when you have light moisture like we had today it’s tough to make that call.

“Obviously, towards the end of the race with the attempted restart we made the wrong one. It just makes you feel sick to your stomach because you know after the fact that you chose poorly. It was clearly my fault.”

A messy day then, but without doubt an old-fashioned motor race of the first order.

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Dario Franchitti led most of the IndyCar Series race in Iowa on Saturday night, but a slow late pitstop dropped the Scot down the order and opened the door to an impressive win for Marco Andretti. The 24-year-old has struggled in recent years and again this season as one of four drivers in father Michael’s Andretti Autosport’s team. In fact, Marco had not won a race in 79 starts, since his first IndyCar victory at California’s Sears Point road course in 2006 – his rookie season.

Tony Kanaan chases Iowa winner Marco Andretti

So it was good to see Andretti score a deserving win on the 7/8ths-mile Iowa oval as he chased Franchitti through the middle of the race and battled back and forth with Tony Kanaan in the closing stages. Andretti clung resolutely to his lead over the last 19 laps despite Kanaan’s best efforts. “Knowing TK,” said Marco, “I knew he would do exactly what I did to him. He’d make his car very wide. I didn’t want to wait until two [laps] to go because he was just going to chop me and I would have been done. I knew I had to get it done earlier and make my car wide.”

Andretti was by far the most competitive of his father’s four cars in Iowa with Ryan Hunter-Reay finishing eighth, Danica Patrick 10th and Mike Conway taken out by Ana Beatriz in an early accident. Kanaan enjoyed another competitive race, and plainly his presence at KV Racing this year has helped push the team to new heights. Kanaan qualified third in Iowa while team-mate Takuma Sato took pole position and led the opening laps. Sato became the first Japanese driver to take an IndyCar pole and ran well in the race until losing control and crashing on the Iowa track’s notorious Turn 2 bump.

Dario Franchitti congratulates Michael Andretti on his son’s win

Championship leader Franchitti set the pace through the first two-thirds of the race but came out of the pits from his second stop behind Andretti. In traffic Dario’s car wasn’t as good as in clean air and he slipped back as the car got more and more tail-happy. He finished fifth but continues to lead the championship after Will Power crashed in Iowa. Franchitti’s Ganassi team-mate Scott Dixon drove well, coming through the field to finish third after qualifying a disappointing 23rd.

Power qualified fifth but damaged his car in a collision in the pits with Charlie Kimball. Later in the race the Team Penske driver crashed, losing valuable ground to Franchitti in the title chase. After eight of 17 races Franchitti leads with 303 points to Power’s 283. Dixon is third with 230 points followed by Oriol Servia (214) and Kanaan (211).

Polesitter Takuma Sato is pursued by team-mate Kanaan

Iowa was the last of three consecutive weekends of racing on oval tracks for IndyCar. The series has next weekend off before a pair of Canadian races in July at a street track in downtown Toronto and an airport circuit in Edmonton. It will be interesting to see if Power and Team Penske can put any pressure on Franchitti and Chip Ganassi’s team, and whether the likes of Andretti, Kanaan, Dixon or Servia can pull themselves into the championship hunt.

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NASCAR’s season kicked off on Saturday with qualifying for this Sunday’s Daytona 500, followed by the Budweiser Shootout 75-lap non-points-scoring sprint race under the lights. Qualifying was swept by Hendrick Motorsports as veteran Mark Martin took pole and team-mate Dale Earnhardt Jr qualified on the outside front row. Thursday’s pair of 150-mile qualifying races will determine the rest of the field.

Rick Hendrick’s four-car Chevrolet operation is split into two separate shops, one for multiple champions Jimmie Johnson’s #48 car and Jeff Gordon’s #24, the other for Martin’s #5 and Earnhardt Jr’s #88. So last weekend’s qualifying performances were particularly sweet for the less well-lauded side of Hendrick’s team. And with restrictor plates cutting horsepower by almost half at Daytona, the drivers were quick to place all credit at the foot of Hendrick’s engine builders and bodymen.

“That was not an accomplishment of mine,” said Martin. “That was [crew chief] Alan [Gustafson] and all our guys, and to have Dale Jr on the front row just means we’re doing our stuff right.”

Added Dale Jr: “I got to thank the engine shop, mainly for the power, and all the guys in the bodyshop for making my car as slick as it is. Hendrick’s is a great organisation and the driver doesn’t have anything to do with it here at Daytona. It’s just all race car right there.”

Saturday night’s Bud Shootout was won by Kevin Harvick aboard one of Richard Childress Racing’s Chevrolets. Harvick beat Kasey Kahne’s Richard Petty Ford and Jamie McMurray’s Earnhardt-Ganassi Chevrolet after many of the favourites were taken out in accidents. Harvick believes he has a good combination for the 500 and is looking forward to Thursday’s qualifying races to get a better understanding of where everyone stacks up.

“Our handling package is fairly good,” he said. “Obviously, it’ll change as we go through the week because everything will shift to daytime temperatures. It was pretty cool tonight and there was probably a bit of added grip to what we’ll have during the 500 as rubber gets onto the race track. But our basic package is really good and tonight that’s what kept us up front.

“I wasn’t tending to one groove,” Harvick added. “I could run the top, bottom or middle and didn’t have to be picky about who I followed. I could go wherever I wanted, and that’s nice to have options like that. It lets you be pretty aggressive and this was an aggressive race. There was not a whole lot of thinking about what the consequences might be. It was all about whatever it took to go forward.”

Saturday afternoon’s 200-mile ARCA race was won by veteran Bobby Gerhart, who scored his sixth win at Daytona. Danica Patrick made her stock car debut in the race, qualifying 12th and finishing a respectable sixth after a collision with Nelson Piquet Jr. Piquet was also making his stock car debut and had to retire, but Patrick recovered and showed plenty of moxie by coming through the field to run with the leaders in the closing laps.

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I had a long conversation recently with Michael Andretti for the book I’m writing about Newman/Haas Racing. Andretti drove for Newman/Haas for 10 seasons between 1989-2000, scoring 35 of his 42 Indycar wins with the team. He won the 1991 CART title with Newman/Haas when Indycar racing was at its healthiest and, despite his terrible season in Formula 1 with McLaren in 1993, Michael remains one of the fastest, most spectacular drivers Indycar racing has ever seen. He was a true racer, as anyone who witnessed his fierce battle with Juan Pablo Montoya in the 2000 Michigan 500 will know.

It’s interesting that Andretti was particularly fast on superspeedways because he despised those tracks. Although he never won the Indy 500, Michael led 431 laps at the Speedway during his career and is easily the highest ranked non-winner among the race’s all-time lap leaders. Yet he freely admits he didn’t like Indianapolis or Michigan.

“Indianapolis was not my favourite track but it seemed like my style really worked there,” he says. “That was one of the best tracks I’ve driven in terms of being competitive, not necessarily just being fast. In the race it seemed like I knew what I needed and it would always work for me, whatever that was. But I never got a result there.

“I always ran good at Michigan but I hated the place. You only hate it because you know that if something goes wrong, it’s going to be big. But once you’re in the car, you’re not thinking about that. When you get out the car at the end of the race your mind is just junk because you had to be so on it mentally. And three or four times in every race at Michigan something big almost happened. I think maybe because I felt that way I really respected the place.”

Andretti believes having confidence in himself and the car and getting through traffic quickly was key to his success on ovals. “If you’re aggressive on an oval you can make time in traffic,” he says. “Races are won on ovals in traffic. You can’t sit back. I won a lot of races on ovals not just because I was [in] the fastest car, but because I had a car that was good in traffic and I was aggressive in traffic.”

Ed Nathman has worked with many drivers over the decades. He was team manager at Newman/Haas from 1989-92 and today he’s chief engineer at Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing, running Montoya’s NASCARs. Despite working with Montoya, Nathman says Andretti remains the most aggressive driver to ever sit in one of his cars.

“Michael is still the most aggressive driver I’ve run,” he declares. “You just had to remind him which way the race track went and he’d take care of the job. Michael was like what I’ve seen with good drivers in NASCAR. They’re always searching for a line. They always know that somewhere out there, there’s more grip on the track.”

Brian Lisles is general manager of Newman/Haas Racing and has been with the team for 21 years. He was Andretti’s race engineer from 1990-91. “Michael was unbelievably brave,” he says. “He hated the superspeedways. He would talk non-stop about how stupid Indianapolis and Michigan were and it was insane to drive there. But he’d get in the car and blow everybody off. I don’t know how he did that, but he just did. A complicated man, Michael, in some ways.”

And a survivor of a great driving career who is fully occupied these days as the sole owner of Andretti Autosports, running no fewer than four IRL cars for Tony Kanaan, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Danica Patrick and his son Marco. It will serve them well to listen to his advice.

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After the usual two weekends of qualifying the 93rd Indianapolis 500 takes place on Sunday. This year’s race looks like being another Penske versus Ganassi battle, but with everyone aboard roughly similar Dallara-Hondas there’s sure to be a long line of cars in the hunt. And, of course, almost anything can happen in a 500-mile oval race with an inevitable multiplicity of full-course yellows.

Team Penske has three cars in this year’s 500, with Hélio Castroneves and Ryan Briscoe starting first and second and Will Power on the outside of row three. Penske’s cars are very strong and the team is chasing its 15th win at Indy to compliment its 15th pole earned by Castroneves.

The Brazilian is in his 10th year with Penske and is looking for his third 500 victory. He scored back-to-back wins in 2001-02, and Hélio is highly motivated following his acquittal on federal tax charges. Team-mate Briscoe is in his second year with Penske’s Indycar team and this will be his fourth 500. The 27-year-old Australian has won on ovals and has the experience and equipment to chase victory.

Countryman Power makes his second start at Indy and his first with Penske. At this stage, having been hired to fill Castroneves’s seat while the latter was occupied with his tax case, Power will not race again in this year’s IRL after the 500. So the taciturn but talented Power will be eager to do well on Sunday.

Chip Ganassi’s team is as strong as ever with the 2007 and ’08 Indy winners, Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon, starting from third and fifth on the grid, while 2007 Indy Lights champion Alex Lloyd starts from row four in a third Ganassi satellite car run by Sam Schmidt Motorsports.

Franchitti and Dixon were slightly off the pace in qualifying but are sure to be in the thick of it on race day. Both have the experience, speed and are race-savvy, while team manager Mike Hull and team owner Ganassi are equally as good as Roger Penske and his racing chief Tim Cindric at playing the strategic games required as the race and yellow flags unfold. So Castroneves, Briscoe, Franchitti and Dixon are equal favourites to win this year’s 500, with Power on slightly longer odds.

The IRL’s third big team is Andretti-Green Racing, winner of the 500 with Franchitti in 2007 and Dan Wheldon in ’05. But the four-car AGR team has looked second best at Indy this year, with team leader Tony Kanaan struggling for speed in his car and resorting to a back-up in qualifying. Still, Kanaan starts from the outside of row two and is a racer who’s entirely capable of stealing his first Indy win.

The odds are longer on AGR’s three other drivers – Marco Andretti, Danica Patrick and Hideki Mutoh, who will start the race respectively from eighth, 10th and 16th. Young Andretti came close to winning in 2006 but has been less impressive over the past 18 months, struggling in the midfield on most road circuits and in street races. Marco is at his best on ovals, Indianapolis in particular, and needs a solid result. Patrick is also at her best on the big speedway and will be trying hard for a good result in what many believe will be her last 500 before switching to NASCAR next year.

Newman/Haas/Lanigan’s Graham Rahal is most likely to cause the biggest upset of the day. The mature Rahal, 19, has done an excellent job in his second year at Indy to qualify fourth, splitting Franchitti and Dixon. I’ve known Graham since he was a kid, so I’m prejudiced, but I believe he’s the most talented, disciplined and most complete of today’s young American open-wheel racers. With any luck he’ll show all those strengths on Sunday.

New NHL team-mate Robert Doornbos had a rough initiation, crashing twice after looking good through the opening days of practice. He recovered well to record the fastest qualifying run on the second weekend and starts 23rd.

Who else might figure in the 93rd 500? Paul Tracy is an obvious choice. He will make his second Indy start in 14 years from 13th, in the middle of the field. Paul finished an unhappy second to Castroneves in 2002 and is trying to salvage his career with Kevin Kalkhoven and Jimmy Vasser’s KV Racing team.

Other dark horses include Brits Justin Wilson and Dan Wheldon, who will start 15th and 18th, and Brazilian Mario Moraes, who makes his second Indy start aboard a KV Racing entry from the inside of row three. Neither Wilson nor Wheldon are with first-class teams, but the unheralded Moraes looked good in practice and qualifying and may surprise on race day.

Also worth watching are fastest rookie qualifier Raphael Matos, who starts from the outside of row four, and Champ Car veteran Oriol Servia, who qualified Bobby Rahal’s car after minimal practice. He starts from row nine.

The only practice session this week is Friday’s ‘Carburetion Day’ followed by an Indy Lights race and pitstop competition. The 200-lap, 500-mile race takes the green flag on Sunday at 1pm EST.

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Hélio Castroneves and team-mate Ryan Briscoe traded the top spot back and forth during the six hours of Pole Day qualifying at Indianapolis last Saturday. On a windy afternoon nobody could challenge the Penske pair, with Castroneves eventually edging his team-mate by half a second over the four qualifying laps. Hélio averaged 224.864mph to Ryan’s 224.083mph.

Briscoe was faster than Castroneves on their first qualifying runs early in the afternoon, but both went quicker later in the day after withdrawing their original cars and speeds. This is Castroneves’s third Indy 500 pole and the 15th time that one of Roger Penske’s cars will lead the field away at the Brickyard.

“The car was too comfortable on our first run,” said Castroneves. “We worked together and made the cars a little more on the edge, a little quicker. It’s a lot of fun when you push the limit and everybody works together to do it. This is a team effort and this team is the best.”

Added Briscoe: “The cars were so good straight off the truck and that gives us a lot of confidence to really trim out the cars for qualifying. It’s been exciting and it’s such a great feeling knowing we’re going into the Indy 500 with very strong cars.”

Castroneves was acquitted on federal tax evasion charges last month and is delighted to once again be a free man able to pursue his chosen profession. “I feel at home here at Indianapolis,” he said. “I just have to thank everybody for the warm welcome I’ve received. It’s like a big family. Racing is my life – it’s what I love and I have to thank all the fans. It means a lot.”

The biggest challenge to Penske came from Chip Ganassi’s cars. Dario Franchitti completed the front row with a run at 224.010mph while last year’s winner Scott Dixon was fifth fastest, just 0.1sec slower than Franchitti over the four laps.

“It would have been nice to be on pole,” said Dario. “But we’ve won from third on the grid before, so hopefully it’s a good omen. Honestly, that was most of the speed the car had in it today. We got hit by a couple of gusts of wind which cost us, but we just didn’t have the speed to match the Penske cars. Those were definitely the craziest qualifying laps I’ve driven here. With the wind and everything, we were hanging it out today.”

Graham Rahal qualified an impressive fourth, splitting the Ganassi pair for Newman/Haas/Lanigan. Rahal had to scrub his original qualifying run because the team wanted to run a slightly different configuration for the race, and he was without a spare car after team-mate Robert Doornbos crashed two – one on Friday and the second on Saturday morning. As a result Doornbos will have to qualify next weekend.

“The car was really nice,” said Rahal. “It had maybe a bit too much understeer. But we got through our run safely, which is what we needed to do. It says a lot for the work this team has done and how much we’ve improved the car over the last year.”

IRL points leader Tony Kanaan was the fastest of Andretti-Green’s four cars. Kanaan qualified sixth and will start the 500 on the outside of row two. Team-mates Marco Andretti and Danica Patrick will start from the third and fourth rows respectively. Also among the first-day qualifiers was Will Power, who put Penske’s third car on the outside of row three.

Fastest in Sunday’s qualifying was rookie Raphael Matos, who lapped his Luczo-Dragon entry owned by Roger Penske’s son Jay at 223.429mph. Matos starts the 500 from 12th on the grid. Paul Tracy was second fastest on Sunday at 223.111mph and will start the race from 13th. Tracy made a couple of qualifying runs on Saturday but was bumped from the top 11. He made two more runs on Sunday before he was satisfied.

Justin Wilson was fourth fastest on Sunday at 222.849mph, qualifying behind Vítor Meira. After making the field on Saturday, Wilson was disqualified for being underweight. Justin re-qualified in good order on Sunday and will start from 14th place in the middle of row five. Also among Sunday’s second-day qualifiers was 2005 Indy winner Dan Wheldon, who crashed on Saturday. Wheldon came back to qualify at 222.777mph and will start from the outside of row six.

The final 11 places in the 33-car field will be determined next weekend, and the race takes place the following Sunday on May 24.

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The new USF1 team owned by Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson was formally announced on Tuesday afternoon on Speedtv in America. USF1 will design, build and race its cars from a facility in Charlotte, North Carolina by 2010 and will be the first American team to compete in the World Championship since Penske and Parnelli back in 1974-77. Anderson is the team principal and Windsor is USF1’s sporting director.

“Ken and I have always wanted to do our own team our way,” said Windsor. “It sounds arrogant perhaps, but we have some history and we have some things we want to bring into the sport that we think we can do well. The key to that was not selling anything more than a very small stake in the team. So we set some unbelievably steep hills to climb in a recession.

“We’ve sold off a small part of the team and I’m pleased to say we’ve done that. We’re two guys who can say we’re going to do a Formula 1 team because we’ve got the capital to do it, and to some extent the recession has helped us a little bit. For those out there who say, ‘Where’s all the money? Where’s the huge facility?’, that day isn’t going to happen with USF1. We’ve always had a very different approach, and that approach will become visible I think as this year unfolds.”

Windsor said the new team would be lean and mean with a budget well under $100 million. “The cost of doing F1 and starting up a new team are dramatically different from the old $48 million bond days,” explained Windsor. “Forget the $100 million budgets and $30 million retainers for drivers. Over the next three or four years it’s going to change dramatically in F1, and that’s our period.”

Anderson expects the team to operate with no more than 120 employees. “We’re looking at hiring over 100 highly-skilled, highly-paid people,” he said. “We want the minimum amount of the best people. Remember that some F1 teams do their own engines or other things. McLaren, for instance, does a lot of things other than racing.

“Even though we might have only 100 or 120 people in-house, there are dozens of vendors we can rely on, which in effect would add up to several hundred. Racing’s a $60 billion industry in North Carolina. It’s all there, probably within 50 miles of Charlotte. In terms of test equipment, a shaker rig or a wind tunnel doesn’t know if it’s got a Cup car or a Formula 1 car on it. I’d say we have more equipment and more talented people in this area than anywhere on the planet. If we can build Stealth fighters here we can certainly put an F1 car together.”

Anderson and Windsor will soon decide where the team’s shop will be located. “There’s one building we particularly like that we’re looking at,” said Anderson. “But there’s lots of real estate available in Charlotte right now.”

The team will use the state-of-the-art rolling ground plane Wind Shear wind tunnel in nearby Mecklenburg. Anderson helped design the tunnel, which has been used by a number of F1 teams. “We can’t name names,” said Anderson, “but quite a few F1 teams have been very happy with the Wind Shear tunnel. A lot of suppliers to F1 are here. McLaren Electronics has a facility in Mooresville. There’s a lot more here than people realise and most of the technology in F1 comes from the United States.”

Anderson said the team is wide open to engine suppliers: “We’re sending out a proposal to all the manufacturers currently in F1 to let them know we’re here and we’ll entertain sitting down with them. For every manufacturer in F1 their biggest market is the United States. The only exception is Renault, but they have an alliance with Nissan so it might make sense for them.”

Added Windsor: “The things we’ve got to achieve in no particular order are: drivers, engines, European (operations) location, the building here, sponsors – all those things.”

Windsor said the list of potential drivers includes Alex Rossi, Conor Daly, Josef Newgarden, Gabby Chaves, Jonathan Summerton, Scott Speed, Danica Patrick (above), Marco Andretti, Graham Rahal and even some NASCAR drivers such as Kyle Busch (below).

“We haven’t made any decisions on drivers yet,” he added. “Your guess is as good as mine. There’s a list of American drivers with the right credentials who have proved they’ve got the talent to race in F1. It’s a question of finding the two most compatible drivers with what we’re setting out to achieve in year one and year two, and who’ll grow with us.”

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The 92nd running of the Indy 500 takes place on Sunday with Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon favoured to score Chip Ganassi’s first win at the ‘Brickyard’ since Juan Montoya turned the trick in 2000. Dixon and Wheldon will start from the pole and the middle of the front row with Penske driver Ryan Briscoe on the outside. Penske team-mate Helio Castroneves starts on the inside of row two with Danica Patrick beside him and Tony Kanaan on the outside of the second row, and this year’s 500 is expected to be a three-team race between Ganassi, Penske and Andretti-Green.

Meanwhile, I had the great pleasure to sit beside four-time Indy 500 winner Rick Mears at the Speedway on Wednesday afternoon as we signed copies of my new book, ‘Rick Mears – Thanks, the story of Rick Mears and the Mears Gang’. Rick was one of the finest oval track racers of all-time and more than a few respectful fans congratulated him on being, ‘the best driver I ever saw at this place.’

Rick Mears and author Gordon Kirby sign copies of the new book, “Thanks. The Story of Rick Mears and the Mears Gang”

In fifteen starts at Indianapolis between 1978-92, Rick won four times, finished second once and come home third two times. He also took six Indy poles and led 492 laps in all. Rick deliberately used his natural inclination to be as silky smooth as possible to keep pushing the limit.

“I always tried to be smooth and I think that helped on the faster tracks, on the speedways,” he says. “By not being erratic you can run closer to the limit more consistently without stepping over it. If you’re erratic, you’ve got to give yourself more of a cushion, so your average overall isn’t going to be as quick. If you’re smooth and run closer to the limit, lap after lap, it adds up. I think that was more my natural style.

“The cars talk to you and you have to listen to them. If you don’t listen to them, you’re going to step over the limit.”

Incredibly, Rick did not spin a car during his first five years with Penske. “It was making me nervous that I hadn’t spun one because I saw other guys doing it, and I thought, ‘What am I leaving on the table?’ I knew I was going to spin sometime. Obviously, I didn’t want it to happen. Back then, if you spun, they frowned on it. Today, they frown on it if you don’t spin once in a while. That’s the difference in the competition level today and the mindset, which is if you don’t do something wrong once in a while you must not be trying hard enough. But back then; it was the other way around.

“So I didn’t want to spin and when I did finally spin it, I realised that I had been very, very close a lot of times, a lot of times! I was just fortunate it hadn’t happened. That was when I realised I wasn’t leaving a lot on the table.

“That’s what this sport is all about and always has been,” he adds. “It’s a continuous learning curve, no matter how long you’ve been doing it. If you quit learning, that’s when it’s time to get out.”

Which is what he did in the middle of 1992 when he realised he was losing the desire to push to the maximum. Mears made the decision to retire from racing at the height of his powers, an uncommon and sage decision from one of the greatest oval racers we’ve ever seen.

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This weekend should be quite a thrash at Indianapolis as everyone who failed last weekend to make the field for this year’s 92nd Indy 500 tries to take one of the remaining twenty-two places in the starting line-up. Chip Ganassi’s drivers and team put on a great show last Saturday to beat Team Penske and Andretti-Green Racing to this year’s Indy 500 pole. Scott Dixon (below) and Dan Wheldon qualified one-two with a pair of mid and late-afternoon second attempts which pushed Ryan Briscoe to the outside of the front row ahead of team-mate Helio Castroneves who will start the race from the inside of row two.

This was Dixon’s eleventh IRL pole but his first at Indy and the first time a Ganassi car has been on the pole at Indy since Bruno Junqueira (below) turned the trick in 2002. The team’s one-two sweep also was a bit of redemption for Ganassi’s team after enduring an unhappy pole day last year.

A disappointed Andretti-Green team couldn’t hit the right combination for qualifying but the team’s four cars will still start fifth (Danica Patrick – below), sixth (Tony Kanaan), seventh (Marco Andretti), and ninth (Hideki Mutoh). With last Sunday’s rainout only the first day’s eleven qualifiers are set for the 92nd Indy 500. The other three are Panther Racing’s Vitor Meira in ninth, Vision’s Ed Carpenter in tenth with Luczo-Dragon’s Tomas Scheckter completing the first day’s qualifiers. Only eight other drivers made full, four-lap qualifying runs on the rain-shortened opening weekend at Indianapolis and despite the unification of Indy car racing it will be a struggle to fill the field with thirty-three reputable cars and drivers.

Meanwhile, Ganassi’s team appears in good shape to make a serious run at winning its first Indy 500 in eight years, since Juan Montoya dominated the race back in 2000. Dixon was second last year, of course, and Wheldon finished fourth in ’06, his first year with Ganassi’s team. Ganassi’s managing director Mike Hull (below with Scott Dixon) compares the working partnership enjoyed by Dixon and Wheldon to the team’s great days ten years ago with Alex Zanardi and Jimmy Vasser.

“Zanardi and Vasser were meant for each other at that point in time, and I think Dixon and Wheldon are meant for each other at this point in time,” Hull remarked. “They aren’t anything alike, except for one common thread – they both want to be better today than they were yesterday. They haven’t lost sight of where they came from and they don’t feed off each other. They learn from each other. Their diversity in approach is probably a benefit. That’s certainly helped us in the past, like with Zanardi and Vasser.

“The more unselfish you can be as a team-mate, or for that matter, a team member, the more your eyes are open each day to learning. And that’s what Scott and Dan have in common. If they can continue down that path, no matter what they do with their lives, they can look back and say they achieved a lot, and that’s where they are as two people racing for us today. Their driving styles are a bit different, but they’ve learned to compare their styles to understand how to help each other.”

Hull says Dixon and Wheldon (above) have learned to drive their cars loose with the tail out in qualifying.

“In order to achieve a really fast lap at Indianapolis it takes a lot of experience,” Hull observes. “You can give somebody the setup that Chip Ganassi Racing had on Saturday afternoon and the driver may be able to drive the race car, but can he drive the car across the short chutes the right way to get the speed that he needs? Scott and Dan have got to the point in their careers where they can do that and they’re doing it together and that compounds your ability to get to the next level.”

As Dixon, Wheldon and the other top eleven qualifiers prepared this week for May 25th’s 500-mile race, the rest of the field – all the former Champ Car teams included – have been preoccupied with simply finding the speed necessary to make the race. Don’t expect any of them to come close to challenging the established IRL teams at Indianapolis this year.

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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.

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