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

I try to avoid being on holiday during a Grand Prix weekend. That’s not always easy once the European season gets underway, as you will appreciate.

Looking at the diary in February I quickly came to realise that the summer was going to be busy, Motor Sport having put my name next to a most encouraging number of events, some of them Grands Prix. An early holiday, or no holiday, were the options.

The latter option did little to improve the atmosphere at home so here we are, in Corfu, and the Spanish GP in Barcelona is not exactly headline news in the local newspapers. The Greeks are a great deal more concerned with football than they are with motor racing. And it is Easter weekend – well, Holy Week to be precise – and access to British newspapers and broadcasting is, to say the least, limited.

Easter Sunday found us with friends in the mountain village of Skripero, slowly roasting a large lamb over an open fire, and easing into the day with an ouzo. To receive the race coverage on ITV requires the installation of a satellite dish the like of which you would expect to find atop GCHQ or some similar secretive government establishment. This is clearly not an option in an area of such outstanding natural beauty. And nor should it be. We therefore break away from the Easter celebrations to watch the Grand Prix unfold on Antenna, a Greek channel with, naturally, a Greek commentary.

As the Ferraris lead the field round lap after lap the commentator doesn’t sound very excited but there is much discussion amongst our international party about what might, or might not, happen over the duration of this first European encounter.

The Italians are pleased, but not surprised, to see the red cars out in front. The Americans want to know what Michael Schumacher is doing these days and why did he stop at the top of his game. (The Italians glance across at Kimi who, through the interference, appears to be cruising to victory). The Brits want to know if Lewis really has what it takes and whether he is truly as cool and charming as he appears? The Greeks, understandably, are more concerned with the lamb slowly turning on the spit.

I mention these things this week because distance delivers a little perspective upon the matter. If you have not seen practice or qualifying, and you do not understand the grid, the race somehow loses some of its intensity. If you have just recently joined the throng around a TV set in a café to watch a most enthralling football match, joining in the general hullabaloo, then the Grand Prix seems somehow not to bring you to the edge of your seat.

In the days following the race at Barcelona I have come to appreciate that there was some excitement, some intrigue, and possibly some measure of the margin that the red cars appear to have over the rest of the field. And it’s interesting how the team from Maranello has a following wherever you travel, in the same way that Manchester United clearly had plenty of support in the cafes of Corfu when they strode onto the pitch at Stamford Bridge last weekend.

The village of Arillas, from where I am writing, seems a world away from fast cars, let alone racing cars. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I am tempted to start to believe that I could wean myself off the drug that got into my bloodstream all those years ago at Goodwood. But I know that such a process is not going to happen. As the grid forms up for the next one I know I will not wish I was here, whatever I may have written on post cards this week.

Incidentally, the internet connection through which you will have received this brief report is not so easy to find. So thanks Dimitris at Brouklis where I have perched to satisfy the terms of my contract. I guess that Jenks would have simply walked down to the post box by the sea and dropped his envelope in with fingers crossed. Those were the days.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine