Welcome to the RACER mailbag. Questions for RACER’s writers can be sent to: mailbag@racer.com. We welcome your comments and opinions, but letters with questions are more likely to be published. Questions received after 3:00 PM EST each Monday will be saved for the following week.
Q: Given PREMA’s commercial struggles in the IndyCar Series, do you think PREMA could have been more successful if it had a driver lineup that included one of its sister team’s Iron Dames drivers? From a commercial standpoint, Prema with its current drivers is just an IndyCar team, and its drivers are kind of “so-so” from a commercial identity standpoint. And just like JHR, I can see the team going to struggle commercially.
If one of the drivers were, say, Dorian Ping, couldn’t PREMA have something more interesting to sell to potential sponsors? Something that would enhance the team’s identity?
What am I missing?
Snarky Moose, Kansas City
Marshall Pruett: I love the idea of you posing, and if someone like Ping, Chloe Chambers, or Leah Bullock had a bigger profile to get in front of a big sponsor, it might work. But they’re not like that here in IndyCar’s domestic realm. For IndyCar to become an option, that situation will need to change quickly, along with more open-wheel experience in bigger, faster cars.
Decades ago, I had a great interaction with Jim Jordan, a former Mazda executive who was joining SRO at the time. He received all sorts of offers from motivated drivers who wanted Mazda to give them a free car or a fully paid Mazda machine.
He was brutally honest when he said he wasn’t here to help people realize their dreams or fulfill their wishful demands. He was there to sell Mazda cars, and if the people asking Mazda for money could be given a valid answer as to how Mazda could sell more cars and make a profit, he would be willing to give them whatever they asked for. All that stuff about what could be, could be, should be, and probably will happen was not an immediate starter. This kind of thing reminds me of my interaction with Jim.
Dorian clearly has talent. In sports cars, we knew long before she entered the F1 academy with PREMA that there was no good reason for a company to give PREMA $9 million to run a season in IndyCar after she won the equivalent of an entry-level F4 championship. I hope things change for her, but the best way to change things is to find help running pins at USF Pro 2000 or Indy NXT.
F1 Academy’s predecessor, Jamie Chadwick, won the W Series title every year, qualified for Indy Lights, and won a race for Andretti Global before her support disappeared. She tested IndyCar with Andretti and impressed the team. But now, unfortunately, she is the reserve driver for the Genesis Hypercar program.
Ping and other F1 Academy talents will need to level up to F4 or higher before IndyCar will grant them a license. Commercial opportunities should be the last consideration at this time.
Q: Now that McLaren and Ford have announced their own GTP/Hypercar programs, how will that affect their respective GT3 programs? Do you see focus and personnel being shifted away from GT3 teams to get prototypes off the ground? When can we expect working prototypes from those automakers?
Brandon Karsten
MP: Ford is not committed to GTP, so the GTD Pro program will continue. Proton represents Ford in WEC’s non-factory LMGT3 class, and that hasn’t changed since Ford established its own hypercar team to race cars in WEC. United Autosport, owned by McLaren Racing CEO Zac Brown and Richard Dean, will run McLaren’s hypercar program. The company has a fleet of LMP2, GT3 and historic cars and plans to add personnel for hypercars as well. McLaren had partnered with RLL to run GT3 cars in GTD Pro. You need to review the test questions.
Q: It was just announced that Mick Schumacher will be leaving Alpine’s GTP program. Perhaps because of his name, he appears to the casual reader to be a dissolute young man who has no idea what he wants to be when he grows up.
F1…opportunity loss. WEC…Terminates the program. IndyCar…The comments after the test were not very accurate.
do you agree? For some reason his name still comes up in the conversation even though there are so many young, extremely talented drivers waiting for the opportunity he has.
chris virginia (This letter arrived before it was confirmed that Schumacher had signed with RLL-ED)
MP: I disagree. What did his post-test comments sound like? He left WEC to go to IndyCar. I felt like he knew exactly what he wanted.
Looking at the bigger picture, half of the past eight F2 champions are currently competing in F1. Six of the eight champions, including Mick, had the chance to race in F1. I’d like to think his rookie season would have been much better if he hadn’t been driving for Nikita Mazepin’s awful F1 team that offered him nothing but money on his debut in 2021, and while having Kevin Magnussen by his side in 2022 was a positive development, the team only finished 8th out of 10 teams.
The F2 champion had a coveted two-year introduction to F1, but Haas decided they needed to inject more experience into the team and appointed Mick to replace Nico Hulkenberg. and Haas finished 10thth By 2023, they were at the bottom of the team, removing the entertaining but terrible Gunter Steiner from the squad, and by 2024, with the same lineup, Haas had jumped to seventh place under coach Ayao Komatsu.
Schumacher seems to have gotten a poor deal, more than he deserved, but when you think about young drivers who need a chance, it’s hard to think of anyone who has done more than Mick. Only Linus Lundqvist was close behind, but like Schumacher, he was at a disadvantage because he was part of IndyCar’s charter system and because Ganassi had to drop two cars.
Theo Pourcher won the F2 title and signed an IndyCar contract with McLaren, but was unable to compete in F1. The team has told us that another F2 champion, Nick de Vries, tested the Meyer Shank but was unable to meet the physical demands of the car. There may be others who have forgotten.
If that’s not the expression of someone who dreams of being an IndyCar driver one day, I don’t know what is. Andy Horn/Getty Images
Q: What is Tim Cindric doing these days? Is there any chance he will return to racing? He always seemed like one of the good guys. I don’t want to see him withdraw from the race.
david tucker
MP: I called and left a voicemail on Time. I’ll let you know when he responds.
Q: I’ve been following Robin Miller for years in print (Mailbag) and on TV (Robin Miller’s Night! Robin Miller’s Night!) and even had a few conversations with him in a few IndyCar paddocks. The last words in a recent mailbag reminded me of something. Over the years, Robin has blamed TGBB. I can’t imagine that being appreciated. What does TGBB think of him now that he’s gone (and missed him so much)? Is bygones really bygones?
Rick, Lisle, Illinois
MP: The great Brian Barnhart and the great Robin Miller got along well for a few years after Brian stopped racing IndyCar. But the rift was certainly real, and after the rift ended – as any good rivalry story should – there were no major attempts to dispel the animosity. I also had a difficult time with Brian. It comes with the territory, but you grow and move on.
Q: Will the 2028 IndyCar be similar to the 4th generation Formula E car?
gordon
MP: Not really.
Q: I think the biggest IndyCar story heading into 2026, not just from a day-to-day perspective but from a big picture perspective, is what happens with Colton Herta in F2 and the PREMA IndyCar team.
In Colton’s case, he will likely race for drivers 3rd to 8th in IndyCar and end up with one of F2’s top teams. Opinions are conflicting, with Chris Medland saying he thinks this year will be a learning year, while Pato O’Ward points out that Herta is the de facto IndyCar representative and will only be racing in F2 to earn a F1 seat in 2027, which will only happen if he succeeds.
With PREMA, it looks like the team is here to buy the best of everything they can get their hands on. They are also historically one of the best Junior Series organizations in Europe.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, if Herta doesn’t do well next year, will people who aren’t IndyCar race fans say, “Those drivers aren’t very good.” And if Prema’s IndyCar team disbands, will they tell potential investors in IndyCar teams and charters that no matter what equipment or money they bring, they won’t succeed?
Will, Indy
MP: Pato is right. It would be bad for IndyCar if Herta were to go down, but it could also be a potential career killer for Colton, which is concerning. We know Herta is and always will be one of IndyCar’s best drivers, but he is not leaving the series as the undisputed best driver. If his European adventure doesn’t work out for some reason, I don’t know how many IndyCar teams other than his own Andretti Global will mount a bidding war for his services. We hope only good things happen for Colton.
I was rooting for his former team owner Michael Andretti when he went to F1. His 1993 season with McLaren was full of disappointments, but there was no question who we had brought in and he was the best IndyCar driver at the time. Michael was the 1991 CART IndyCar Series champion with 10 seasons of IndyCar experience under his belt, a 27-win owner, and began testing McLarens in 1991.
When F1 was canceled for myriad reasons that have been constantly documented over the past 40 years, he returned to IndyCar and regained the same great self, albeit without the front row seat he had until 1992.
Herta arrives there with seven seasons of IndyCar experience, a best finish of second in the championship and nine wins. Similar to Michael, but never the same. Having seen both drivers at their peak, I can tell you that Colton was definitely scary to deal with on road and street courses, especially with his 2019-2021 form. If that horrible version can come back, he’ll be fine.
Q: I was watching WEC in Bahrain and wondered if anyone had a more successful racing career after leaving IndyCar than Mike Conway? In my opinion, only two players in the last 30 years have come close: Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya. What do you say?
oh steve
MP: Great call to Conweezy. Helio comes to mind. Although he didn’t become an IndyCar champion, he finally won the big pro title he’d been chasing for decades in IMSA DPi with Acura Team Penske. Ryan Briscoe stands out. He won a lot of races, and I think of Sébastien Bourdais, who was active in sports cars and open wheels at the same time and had a great career in IMSA and WEC. AJ Allmendinger certainly did well in NASCAR and Grand-Am. Jeff Brabham had a modest IndyCar career before making a name for himself in IMSA. Ryan Dalziel. Jan Heylen. I think I’m forgetting a lot of people to mention.
Q: Now that Marco Andretti has announced that his driving career is over, we have some questions about his famous on-air insult and its long-term aftermath.
First, Marco and Michael once lashed out at Eddie Cheever, blaming him for Marco’s crash at Watkins Glen. And Paul Treacy once hilariously said that Marco was unfit to be a paid driver, except for Uber. And in a similar corporate diss, an irate Robbie Gordon once told reporters after a race that Ford’s engines were “pigs” on the straights.
Have the combatants in any of these conflicts ultimately reconciled, or are they still angry with each other? Did Marco send Eddie a bottle of Andretti’s wine? Did Eddie send Marco a bag of Rachel’s potato chips? Did Robbie finally buy a Raptor pickup? We know.
Marwood Stout, Camarillo, California
MP: Are they stuck in time and unable to move forward and live a fulfilling life because of something that happened at the racetrack 20 years ago or what was said on TV 10 years ago? Yes. absolutely.
Marco retired and focused all of his free time on psychotherapy, trying to break free from the mental prison created by Cheever and Tracy. Robbie continues his revenge on Ford by hopping into a Chevrolet-style truck at a street racing event.
At least Marco and PT should have reignited their rivalry in the SRX series. Elsa/SRX/Getty Images
Q: Have you ever considered bringing back celebrity support races? I know it was a promoter’s event in Long Beach, but there is reason to believe IndyCar should consider something like this on an actual road course. Check out GP Explorer and you’ll see why. Apparently, the large number of influencers in F4 cars could draw a bigger crowd than any other race this year other than the 500.
Of course, the idea seems completely ridiculous, but the numbers don’t lie.
intention
MP: Yeah. It’s not a joke. IndyCar has 778,000 followers on IG. I’ve never heard of GP_Explorer, but it’s 1,100,000.
Truth be told, all of the things you brought up are exactly what other non-top series like F1 and NASCAR should consider. By the way, I just read it, thisit must have cost a lot of money.
Outside of F1 and NASCAR, we’ve seen some influencers go out of their way to spend all kinds of cash that series, manufacturers and teams have set aside for expensive hotels, expensive cars, and general luxury car chaperones for the weekend just to get those influencers to post short videos that draw followers into the series, brand, or team. Some of the collaborations may be inappropriate, but they definitely work.
So, regarding this particular topic, yes, if you copy the GP_Explorer model and hold an all-influencer IndyCar-themed race, it will definitely get a lot of attention.
The only thing I feel sensitive about here is for new journalists and young journalists who are trying to make it in this sport. What if we offered the same room/car/meal/travel for every freebie a series/maker/team gives to an influencer for the next wave of reporters trying to build a career and barely surviving?
A series/manufacturer/team would be willing to spend thousands of dollars on flights, hotels, meals, and more every weekend on people parachuting in and out while young reporters earn pennies, stay in the cheapest/worst hotels, take the cheapest/worst flights, eat garbage, and wear themselves out to make regular appearances and cover their favorite series and sports.
Three-day influencer relationships always bring in huge amounts of money, but they rarely help young journalists who want to carve a place in the industry. It doesn’t feel right.
Q: Hello. IndyCar fan’s rant.
My wife would like to give an employee IndyCar tickets to the Portland race as a Christmas exchange. Portland is our home track and I have attended every IndyCar/CART/Champ Car race there since 1986, at one point providing all the drinks for the race and making my wife an IndyCar fan in the process.
She asked me the price of grandstand tickets and pit passes. There is no information on the Portland GP website. So I sent a note to my friends at Green Savoree, the organizers of this event.
Here is the reply email I received:
tod
Bitnile.com Thank you for contacting IndyCar Grand Prix of Portland. And thank you for being a loyal fan!
Tickets are scheduled to go on sale after the new year, but the release date has not been determined. In other words, it will not be useful for Christmas (it may be a borrowed book).
Please make sure you are registered for E-Club from our home page so that notifications will be sent to your email address.
Now, I want to be clear. My wife is very excited about IndyCar and wants to give out race tickets to people who have them. never I went to an Indy car race. But this is what I got back from the promoter.
This series has been going on for decades, but some promoters don’t know how to promote it. How will the series grow?
Why is it so difficult to get tickets into fans’ hands? I won’t be able to purchase the seats I’ve had for a very long time until sometime in May. The performance is in August.
There is only so much money available for purchasing things like entertainment and travel. The series will be six races deep into the season before the promoter gets my money.
I have been attending the Daytona 24 Hours for the past four years. I thought this would be a “cross it off my bucket list” item. Because you can renew the same ticket package at the racetrack and buy it at a discounted price. I will go again in 2026. It’s easy. This is my credit card. See you next year.
Why did I do that? I’m in the race. I am rejuvenated from the race and at the track. The scene, the smells, the sounds, the team, the pit, the transporters, the people, everything. I want to do it again tomorrow. Please bring your money today. It will be nine months from now before I receive an email. Last year that email got caught in the junk mail and I almost lost my seat because I didn’t respond fast enough.
I haven’t heard from the promoter since around the time of the Portland race in August.
no. sorry. Please wait until May. Makes a wonderful Christmas/birthday or celebration gift. Give them the loan and tell them to have a nice day.
Now, this is an advertisement.
tod hutchens
MP: That’s interesting. Looking further afield than Portland, tickets are on sale for the NASCAR Championship Finale in Homestead next November. On Saturday afternoon, I received an email from the Las Vegas F1 promoter with a deposit link for next year’s race, which seemed like a pretty ambitious move. Tickets for the 2026 race will be available online hours before the 2025 race.
It makes me wonder if IndyCar could work towards standardizing ticket sales in a similar way to various promoters. I received the email on Thursday. Tickets went on sale Friday for the first IndyCar race of the year in St. Petersburg, with St. Pete and Portland sharing the same promoter, Green Savory Racing Promotions. In early November, the Long Beach Grand Prix, owned and promoted by Penske Entertainment, announced that tickets would go on sale Nov. 10.
This means that tickets for the fifth race of the season will go on sale 11 days before tickets go on sale for the first race. In my brain, that’s weird.
Portland is very fan friendly unless you want to give away tickets as a Christmas present. Chris Jones/Penske Entertainment
Q: Both F1 and IndyCar require at least one pit stop during a race through their tire selection rules. My question is, if this rule had not been in place, could either series actually run races on a single tire for the entire period? Let’s take ovals out of the question and eliminate refueling from IndyCar. Is it possible to have hard tires from either series available throughout the entirety of Spa? All over Mid-Ohio?
This makes me wonder if there is a sprint series where the rules prevent it from being a sprint race, rather than a race that is too long to run without pit stops. If that’s the case, you could simply make the race longer, but I think there are problems with that as well. After all, this is not an endurance race.
The race in Qatar will effectively require two pit stops. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
Bill Juras, Austin, Texas
MP: Of course. Firestone can make your tires last as long as you need them. If Mid-Ohio requires 1 hour and 50 minutes, teams will have rock-like rubber that barely breaks down and barely grips the track, but a thick skin that the rubber won’t peel off will heat up as the carcass retains heat, reducing performance. But yes, that’s something Firestone can do. The real question is why they would want to do that, and why would anyone want to watch another IndyCar race after Mid-Ohio?
Chris Medland: This issue occurs with certain tracks on the calendar. Qatar was a perfect example of this, with Pirelli concerned about tire wear and by the end of the race some tires had run out of rubber, exposing their structure. High-speed corners and abrasive pavement cause excessive tire wear, so even the hardest tires won’t cover the race distance without crawling.
If you must, the answer is yes on many circuits, but doing so will slow you down considerably. The problem could be wear, but in a place like Spa, it’s not a very abrasive surface so it’s actually likely not a problem, and if you go slow enough you can keep enough rubber in the tires.
Look at Las Vegas. Kimi Antonelli effectively ran the entire race on a set of hard tires (and easily gave his pace at the end), with low wear levels and degradation due to very low temperatures, smooth roads, and very few high-speed corners.
Q: As the F1 title race draws to a close,‘It all comes back to Spain. you read that correctly. Remember when Max and George got together (to say the least) resulting in Max being penalized and out of points? Exactly how many points did he lose at that moment?‘There’s a good chance Max could lose the title just by getting frustrated.
Clinton, St. Joseph, Missouri
CM: Clinton, you’re spot on. I sat with it as a topic for a while, waiting to see if Max was close enough to make a difference. However, in Spain he lost nine points and would have finished fifth had he passed Russell without any problems, but was demoted to tenth due to a penalty.
Others may argue over trivial things, but for me this is the only time I truly think everyone agrees that Max won’t be able to get the most out of this season’s races and still potentially cost a ton of money. If he hadn’t been penalized, he would now be 15 points behind Lando Norris and nine points behind Oscar Piastri.
Q: Did we mention that McLaren was kicked out of the race for scratches one-tenth and two-twentieth of a millimeter deep? What exactly is the performance advantage gained by scratches that shallow? Do the authorities even know the purpose of the skid plate?
B. Bale
CM: McLaren was disqualified due to plate wear exceeding the legal limit of 0.12mm in Lando Norris’ car and 0.24mm in Oscar Piastri’s car. The legal limit for board depth is 10mm thick when installed but allowed to go down to 9mm after racing, allowing for some wear during racing, but only 1mm and not an excessive amount.
The reason this rule exists is to prevent teams from driving their cars too slowly. Ground effect regulations place great emphasis on getting the floor as close to the ground as possible for performance, and getting one millimeter closer to the track has significant effects. However, if the car is running too slowly, the floor can stall and instantly lose all of its performance.
The plates are used to monitor the car’s speed, so all teams must meet wear requirements. Teams that do not meet this standard run lower than other teams to improve performance, suggesting that they may have driven their cars too low.
So the problem is not the depth of the scratches, but the fact that the car represents running at a level that the FIA has deemed too low (a line needs to be drawn somewhere in the rules), with a clear performance benefit from the additional downforce generated by the floor at lower levels.
In F1, the purpose of the board is to monitor ride height and vehicle legality. These were introduced in 1994 following the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger at Imola, and it is believed that one of the causes of Senna’s crash was that the floor of the car stalled when the car was running low (possibly caused by low tire pressure after an early safety car restart).
The F1 champion may be decided by a difference of one or two millimeters. Rudy Kaleseborg/Getty Images
Q: With all the texts and emails coming to light about NASCAR executives’ feelings about fans and teams, when does it become a problem for us to pay their sport and other motorsports customers? NAS-T-CAR should care more about money than it does about fans (well done, Michael Jordan, you showed us what some fans have been thinking all along).
When will enough be enough? Stands are empty, ticket prices have skyrocketed, and some events are no longer enjoyable (just look at the TV ratings).
When will NASCAR and IndyCar return to their roots? Spec cars aren’t meant to entertain fans. It used to mean something when automakers unveiled their products at racing events. Back in the days of David Pearson, Richard Petty, Donnie Allison, Dale Earnhardt, AJ Foyt, the Answers, Shaw, and Andretti, it was the stuff you brought to the track, the stuff you built in the back garage, the stuff you ran under the tree in the back (Wood Brothers), and it wasn’t the stuff you put decals on to look like cars or the shallow shell of something old enough to be considered vintage.
Ingenuity, creativity and simple hard work are what made the sport of motorsport, and that is lost on today’s sanctioning bodies.
When will NASCAR and Roger Penske realize that fans don’t want cookie-cutter vehicles? Let race teams, drivers, engineers, and car suppliers innovate, create, build, and race. Even if your product doesn’t work or doesn’t make it to the competition, try, try again, and try harder. Don’t cry that it’s an unfair advantage. That’s why we change the rules and limit competition. Race on Sunday, sell on Monday. It’s hard to say that the cars you see on the track are the ones you can buy off the showroom floor. Also, in the case of IndyCar, products raced today (12-15 years ago) are not included in the vehicles you can buy today or next year.
To all promoters, car companies, racetrack owners, and race series, please restore motorsport arenas and competition to what they were meant to be. Make sports fun, not theatrical. It was never intended to be a play, except in the case of intense disagreements and going off the rails.
So let them throw helmets, yell at each other, throw punches, hit transmissions with drivers and hammers in the pit lane, build turbo “beasts”, strap airplane wings to decklids, dream of stock blocks, develop electronic fuel injection or direct fuel injection, diesel-fueled engines, or hybrid systems associated with vehicles on the road. Not a micro science fair project for kids, but a race vehicle similar to the ones we all drive today, with parts and components designed for tomorrow and tested on race tracks.
So, fans, stop supporting a bunch of people who don’t care about fans. The little people who pay us money to call us rednecks, the fans who can’t read, who don’t care, or who can’t tell the difference. We know the difference, but until we get the sport back to its roots, back to non-manipulated competition, back to something meaningful and supportable, it’s time to say goodbye.
Dear Indiana fans
MP: Yes. I spend a lot of my free time in the nostalgic world of different eras of racing, which is my favorite series of all kinds. There are great lessons to be learned from the past, but going back to the past makes no sense to me. Given the context of time and age, I always wonder which roots exactly IndyCar should return to? The answer is completely subjective, and usually people who say they “need to go back” to something are referring to a point in their childhood when they fell in love with it.
So if you’re 100 years old, IndyCar’s roots are in front-engine Millers. If you’re 80 years old, it’s probably something like a post-World War II jalopy or roadster. And if you’re 20 or 25, it was probably a Dallara DW12 with a manufacturer’s aero kit. If you want to take IndyCar back to its true roots, it’s race day at Indy in 1911.
In terms of technology, I can’t think of anything in the IndyCar world I grew up in, from the CART days to today, where the cars were truly related to the auto industry. It’s been the same for decades. Perhaps the most influential modern technology, although we are not exactly sure which series first used it, is the TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitoring System). This has been used for decades in IndyCar, F1, IMSA, and more.
And yes, we want to bring back the old technology with different types of engines, different chassis and tire suppliers. Those were the good old days. All I need to figure out is how to boycott how to get them back. Until that happens, we have memories, books, magazines, and YouTube to evoke the past.
Kelly Crandall: I don’t think it’s accurate to say that fans aren’t important. Because NASCAR listens and sees a lot more than people give it credit for. But that doesn’t mean they always do what the fans want. Please don’t joke. NASCAR is not alone in making personal comments about sports officials and race fans. Many people will be disappointed when comments come out about what people actually think about the other side of the bulwark.
Yes, the grandstands aren’t as full as they used to be, and that happens. Interest has waned and the sport is no longer at the heights it reached in the 1990s and 2000s. As the sport evolves, there is a lack of interest. I cannot comment on ticket costs as that is not my area of expertise.
As for going back to the roots of the sport, I don’t know what that means. NASCAR brought back North Wilkesboro and Rockingham. Darlington has restarted two races since that failure in the early 2000s. Bowman Gray is scheduled.
But no, it will never be executed with what you brought or with the ingenuity it once was. It’s a business and things are evolving. I agree that drivers should be able to express more emotion, whether it’s throwing a helmet or otherwise. There are great personalities in this sport that are suppressed by fear of sponsors and NASCAR penalties.
This sport will never be what it was. Things have changed. But everything is cyclical and I’ve seen things go away and come back many times. Let’s see if that continues.
Q: I read that Project 91 will enter the NASCAR Cup Series in 2026. Who will drive the car?
Chris Fiegler, Latham, New York
K.C.: According to Sports Business Journal, Justin Marks said he would bet on a 2026 comeback, but that’s about as much as he could elaborate. At the end of the day, it comes down to what kind of sponsorship deals they have with their partners, which in turn determines who will be promoting it. No races or drivers have been announced.
Q: With Steve Phelps’ statements about Richard Childress recently made public as part of a lawsuit, how long will it be until the two of them enjoy a delicious meal and a bottle of Childress’ signature wine at the Bistro Restaurant at Childress Vineyards?
David, Waxhaw, NC
KC: Steve Phelps reportedly contacted Richard Childress recently after it became clear that the messages would be made public. But there’s no word on how that connection came to be. richard childress racing issued a statement on Monday Regarding that matter.
last word
From Robin Miller’s Mailbag, November 25, 2020
Q: I know all of Jimmie Johnson’s questions seem repetitive at this point, but let’s try to make this one a little different. We’ve seen things like full heat races in IndyCar and open wheel drivers switching to NASCAR full time. I think Tony Stewart, Robbie Gordon, Sam Hornish Jr., John Andretti, Danica, JPM, hell, Dario also made the switch at one point, but it feels like this was always a one-way street. More than just a one-off race, who was the last one to go the other way? Can this be seen as a sign that IndyCar is catching up to NASCAR in terms of national popularity, or do you think this is a one-off?
michael of brownsburg
Robin Miller: I think you have to go back to 1971 when Cale Yarborough ran the USAC Championship Trail full-time with Gene White and Lloyd Ruby as teammates. Cale finished fifth at Trenton and Michigan, placing him 16th in the points standings and drawing rave reviews. “If you put him in a good car, he’ll be there in no time,” Mr. Rube said. Donnie Allison also ran for AJ Foyt four times that season, hitting his sixth in Indianapolis. Lee Roy Yarbrough nearly won the first California 500 in 1970, finished third at Trenton in 1971, was a two-time starter at the Indy 500 as a part-timer, and qualified eighth in 1969. But JJ’s move suggests nothing more than a stock car champion who wants to try something else and has the financial stability, knowledge and balls to step outside his comfort zone.
