Review: Suntrust Indy Challenge

This picture was taken just after the end of the Suntrust Indy Challenge. That, or he just saw the Boost Mobile commercial with Danica signing fat dudes' chests. Either way, this poor li'l fella is not feelin' very good right now.

Seriously, what the hell happened to IndyCar racing? I had this race set on DVR so I could come home after my friend's birthday was over and watch the race. Unfortunately, I also fired up some of the other blogs on the interwebs and found out that this may have been the worst auto race of any kind ever.

After Scott Dixon grabbed the lead via pit stops around mid-race, I TURNED THE RACE OFF. This is the first time I haven't sat through a full IndyCar race in...I don't even know how long.

I'm tired of even trying to think of little suggestions for how Brian Barnhart can fix this. What they need to do is figure out what the spec of these cars and engines were around 2005 and just revert them all back to that. Whatever small things that were done over the past four years have finally added together to absolutely kill the IndyCar Series. If we're to have at least two more years with this formula, it needs to be solved before the races are run in front of nothing but the flies in the floodlights.

My predictions were middling this time around. The pick of Dario Franchitti as winner might've been good had he been, y'know, able to pass. Instead, his teammate Scott Dixon takes the cake once again. Dark horses Mutoh and Matos were kind of decent choices, with Hideki coming home fourth and Matos in eighth. My Danica Watch turned out to be pretty darn wrong. I'm going to have to say that's not down to her driving, though; position in this race was determined by pit work and not much else. Dixon, Franchitti, and Rahal were given their position based on some lucky breaks, while Mutoh and Patrick were given their position based on some pit strategy. Everyone else was a lap down and that was all she wrote.

One major surprise is the lack of Penske cars on track when the checkered flags flew. I'm not sure what exactly happened to them, but turn 2 was apparently not very friendly to them. Briscoe was out early with his slide and wall contact off of the second turn and Helio (from all accounts...it was after I turned the race off) did the exact same thing later on. Uncharacteristic mistakes from a couple of great drivers on a great team.

U.S. of A. is up 2-1 on Brazil right now in the Confederations Cup Final, which has turned out to be 500,000-times more interesting than the IndyCar race was. Later on today, it's tons of motorcycle racing from Donington (WSBK) and Assen (MotoGP). I'm going to try my best to simply forget about the IndyCar race...at least until Robin Miller shows up on Speed Channel later tonight.