Manning's the Man...

...to sit in Dryer & Reinbold's second car when the green flag drops at St. Pete this weekend.

The Yellow Shirt would like to welcome back to the IRL suave cook-extraordinaire Darren Manning to give D&R a little more British flavor.

Honestly, I hadn't been paying much attention to Manning. The fuss was about Justin Wilson, then Ryan Hunter-Reay, then Paul Tracy, then Milka Duno possibly going to Newman/Haas/Lanigan, then Buddy Rice not having a job. I kind of forgot entirely about the entirely competent English driver who got canned by A.J. Foyt in favor of Vitor Miera.

I think Manning is a good fit with D&R because...well, he's been with kind of lower-level teams his whole career and he knows how to deal with the Issues involved. Now, you might look at his resumé and say, "Hey, he was with Chip Ganassi...That's not lower-level!" That's true, they aren't...right now. When Mad Manning was with them, though, they were running the Toyota engine that Toyota had stopped caring about and kinda stopped developing to be competitive. So, everyone in the IRL back then was second-class to Rahal/Letterman and Andretti/Green and their mighty Hondas of doom.

Besides, it'll be good to have another person around to help British noob Mike Conway learn the ropes of oval racing.

Finally, I was about to join my new blog-o-rama community in writing some angry thing about how there were twenty-one cars on the entry list for St. Pete, but the League and D&R stepped up at the right time to even things out a bit. 22 is such a nice even number...it even looks nicer typed out than 21.

The eleven rows of two will take the green this Sunday afternoon on VERSUS. Check your listings, kids.

Update! Mad Manning confirmed today during the IRL's teleconference that he is only signed for the St. Petersburg race. Perhaps D&R is going the wait-and-see route on their new investment before letting him loose at Long Beach.