Q: I appreciated what Robin Miller said about Gary Bettenhausen in last week’s Final Word. My home track of Toledo Speedway often hosted USAC sprint cars two and three times a season as our hometown guy, Rollie Beale, was a front-runner in the division and eventually took the title in 1973. Anyway, I was present for a number of episodes of the Gary and Larry (Dickson) Show and they never failed to disappoint.
I’ve been watching all kinds of motorsports events since the ’60s and I often listen for the point at which someone gets off the gas before a turn. When Bettenhausen and Dickson were running nose to tail, it was very difficult to tell as they sounded like one car! I was also at MIS for the ’81 Michigan 500 when Pancho Carter took his only win and Tony had his best finish of second. As was mentioned, tragedy seemed to follow that family in much the same way as the Kennedys. However, rest assured that when the Bettenhausens showed up, they came to race!
Regarding NASCAR at Chicago, I hope to be there! We’ll see how it goes, but to me, this is important: “If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got!” Positive thoughts to NASCAR for stepping outside of its comfort zone. However, one thing seems appropriate to me. It would make sense to me that the districts represented to aldermen who are not on board with the race not benefit in terms of tax revenues. That only seems fair.
I’m still not pleased by the reception of Andretti Global by the F1 community. Funny how “We want races in the U.S.” translates into “…but we don’t want another U.S. team; particularly one that might be the best of the rest in a few years and push us down the order.”
Don Hopings, Cathedral City, CA
MP: Thanks for sharing, Don.
Q: We’re interested in attending the open test for Indy Car at IMS in April. Where would one find a schedule for the two days that testing is held to allow us to plan our time at the track?
Chris Graue
MP: It’s usually scheduled for two days with the second as a fallback in case it rains on the first day. Running starts in the morning — it can be delayed if track and ambient temperatures need to come up — and goes until early evening. If you’re wanting to spend time on one of the viewing mounds next to the IMS Museum, plan on being there all day.
Q: Larry Miller was asking in the Mailbag about listening to radio from his iPhone. There are a couple of apps that allow one to listen to live radio.
The Web Audio Player app receives all three stations by WIBC “The Fan” (93.1, 93.5, and 107.5). It requires what is known as an Audio Unit host like the app AUM. Radio Unit is another app which works in the same manner, and also receives WIBC.
I haven’t used them at a race, but I often listen to football games with it while watching games on TV with friends, and the iPhone audio is typically 45 to 50 seconds ahead of the TV broadcast.
Scott
MP: Thanks, Scott. I might need to do some app downloading.
Q: Not really sure which of the three contributors are better served to answer this one, but I wanted to get some opinions on the state of officiating within motorsports, mostly due to this weekend’s F1 race. It seems like in IndyCar, F1, and to a lesser degree NASCAR, complaining about the stewards/race officials is a favorite pastime of fans and drivers, alike. Yet if I look across other sports — basketball, football, etc. — I hear similar comments. The refs are biased, they have a favorite, so-and-so always get the call. So, I have two questions: Is the officiating really that bad compared to other sports? Or is it more of a situation where, we fans have more access, more TV views, and more pundits to tell us what we want to hear?
Chuck Parsons
(ED: We weren’t sure which of the three contributors would be best-placed to answer this one either, so we threw it open to all of them.)
MP: Next to racing, the NBA is my favorite sport and the incessant complaining to the refs by players and coaches — more often about the penalties that aren’t called than the ones that are — quickly kills my joy. That’s the big difference in what I see across IndyCar, F1, IMSA, and NASCAR.
In F1, and IMSA, to a lesser degree, it’s constant whining from drivers, teams, and some fans about the need for every little item to be penalized. It can be exhausting. And when we do have a penalty, especially in F1, Sweet Baby Jesus, enough global energy is invested — largely on social media and fan vlogs in assigning blame or proclaiming innocence — to power New York for a year.
Barring Michael Masi at the 2021 F1 title decider and IndyCar throwing the green flag in the rain on the Loudon oval in 2011, plus IMSA getting the outcome of the GTD race at the Rolex 24 At Daytona in 2014 completely wrong, the mind-blowing mistakes are the exception, not the rule.
CHRIS MEDLAND: I think you’re right, Chuck; I think it’s just like any other sport in that sense. From an F1 point of view the number of camera angles and radio channels etc that fans can get means they can spot so much more during a race than people at the track might, and they are effectively as close to the action as the stewards because they’re all watching on screens.
With the continuous running in racing, you don’t get the natural breaks you have in other sports to review incidents, so that’s a difference that makes it harder to make quick calls that don’t have unintended or unwanted consequences. And I also think the officials being faceless and hidden away in race control rather than on the field or court — as in many other sports where people can see just how tough their job is — doesn’t help the situation.
KELLY CRANDALL: Not having covered any other sport at a professional level, I can’t answer where NASCAR stacks up with officiating in the sports landscape. And when I watch other sports, I’m watching purely as a fan and not thinking about the rules and the procedures of the event. So, in my case, I hardly get caught up in complaining about the officiating. (Unless something seems completely egregious and my bias for my team comes out.)
In the case of NASCAR, fans are too smart. That’s not an insult. Fans are very well-informed about the sport and aren’t afraid to take the sanctioning body to task. There are a lot of NASCAR executives on social media — or there were, but some have given up because of the vitriol. A NASCAR executive is also on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio every week. So fans are exposed to the rules and regulations and hear about them every week, and they feel they know how things should go.
I think you make a good point that fans have a lot of access and aren’t watching just to enjoy the event anymore, they are invested in what happens, and that includes how they view the way rules are enforced. Plus, let’s not forget that drivers and teams talk about them all the time, and those individuals have the loudest microphone, so by and large, NASCAR will always be viewed as the bad guys.