Bay-area beauty: The joy of racing in California wine country

Yes, technically it’s a great driver track. It just needs a real hairpin or two (or at least some adjusting of the tighter turns for passing). Laguna Seca I think is better (The Corkscrew = BEST CORNER IN THE WORLD)

BTW: Just saw on pressdog’s twitter that he called the NNS Dodge COT a “Charger”. As a Challenger owner, I hear this all the time as people STILL keep calling my car a “Charger”.

I’m THIS close to buying and using weaponry if I hear it again. Educate that man. The Toyota Camry (and similar “appliances”) has RUINED American car culture. A chick at a gas station called it a Camaro….I basically snapped at her. This is getting ridiculous.

Probably means the masses WON’T notice the new 2012 cars. Or the turbo whistle.

I’ll be there in person for the second year in a row…

And maybe that’s part of the problem. Drivers’ tracks sometimes aren’t fan tracks because of how difficult it is for the racers to gain position on each other. Fans who don’t understand the dynamics of driving a track of this type may get impatient with the lack of action that they might see at, say, the Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland. TV doesn’t help much either because television tends to focus on the leaders and not on the pack – and it is a fact of life that much of the best action on a road or street course occurs behind the top three or four leaders.

I couldn’t agree more. And that’s what drives me nuts about complaints aimed at street and road courses: It’s a different set of skills and a different sort of racing, but too many people complain that it’s boring because you don’t see as much passing. Gah! That’s like complaining about golf because you only see them score 1 out of every 3 to 5 swings. Appreciation of road course racing is built upon realizing – not necessarily understanding, just realizing – the existence of the skillset it takes to turn consistent times around a twisty course that could have multi-apex, sometimes off-camber, and occasionally variable radius turns. I’ll argue until I’m blue in the face that ovals are not inferior, but I’ll also argue until I’m red in the face that road/street courses are not superior; they simply call on different skills and present different sets of challenges to drivers. And those skills manifest in so many ways other than passing that it’s actually limiting to only pay attention to when drivers overtake. Passing can be the cumulation of specific application of those skills, but it isn’t the only place those skills are on display. Just like basketball, where so many skills are needed to put a player in a position to shoot that much of the game is lost if people only watch the player when he’s shooting.

This, by the way, is why I want to see a good balance of turn-lefts and road/street courses in the series. Doesn’t have to be 50-50, but I strongly feel that it has to be a mix. And that’s because I feel that it’ll once again be Indycar’s one claim they can have over any other series: Diversity. It may not be as diverse as those old USAC drivers that also competed in rallys and dirt tracks, but it is more diverse than road/street only Formula One, and slightly more diverse than Cup racing, which has what, 3 races with right turns? 4? Something like that?

Anyway, back to techical driving and fan appreciation: It’s more than just passing. That’s important, of course – no one wants to watch a parade where the finishing order is nearly set in stone by the qualifying order – but it’s not the be-all, end-all, only good thing about racing either. Just because an ordered parade is undesireable, it doesn’t automatically follow that an overabundance of passing is good. It can be… or it can look less like racing and more like a mob flowing in one direction, with passing being based too little on application of skill and too much on luck of the draw regarding who’s got clear track in front of him and who doesn’t. What makes racing exciting is seeing genuine passing built on driver skill to the situation in front of them at the moment. Artifice stinks, and even an untutored fan could recognize it after a while.

So yes, I definitely don’t want to see a drivers course like Infineon go away. Appreciating racing at Sonoma doesn’t take away from my love of the short tracks like Iowa or the superspeedways like Indycar’s home track. Rather, it expands my enjoyment. I can see drivers like Dixon, TK, Franchitti, Helio, etc. test the knife-edge of their car’s balance on an oval, then wait a bit and see them employ other skills on a twisty course. And I can love it all. But I don’t want parts of it to go away. I really don’t.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time at my western base, Laguna Seca, which is a much more interesting and challenging track than Sonoma both physically and mentally. Heck, even driving TO the track you get to spin up and over passes straight out of a CHiPs tanker rollover scene.

Most of the mistakes I’ve seen at Sonoma have been of the “excuse me, for I’ve spun and now I’ve left you no place to go” variety while at the Laguna you see the full-on wheel-cranked opposite-lock out-of-real-estate into a cascade of rocks and tire barriers variety.

And the Corkscrew.

Can’t have a glass of wine without thinking of the Corkscrew. I’m sure it’s singlehandedly responsible for making Bryan Herta straight edge.