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www.streetdriventour.com Enjoy coverage from the Street Driven Tour in St. Louis back from July 4th, 2015 at Gateway Motorsports Park.
Editor's Note: This car is NOT being driven by Rick Mears, who retired from IndyCar racing in 1992 and is 72 years old. I just think of Rick Mears every time I see this yellow Pennzoil paint scheme on a car.
I've already mentioned that the guy driving this car is Scott McLaughlin, a 30-year-old who's been driving IndyCar since 2020 and who's won five races in that time. IndyCar only runs 18 races a season, so five races in four years is a pretty good record.
He's one of three drivers working for Roger Penske, who I've mentioned a few times already. Penske is an extremely rich guy who's familiar to me because he also owns three NASCAR teams, and has often hired drivers I don't like. (Though he's got Ryan Blaney now, and I like him.) He started his career as a driver back in the early 1960s and ran in the Formula-1 circuit for a couple of years. But he was never very good as a driver, so in the mid-1960s he jumped onto the owner side and started running race teams. He proved much better at that, and over time, he built Team Penske into a race car mega-empire. He's one of the biggest off-track names ever to compete in all of auto racing, and Trump gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Trump kind of undercut the value of that medal during his tenure, but it's still a big deal.)
Penske owns three cars on the track today at Indy. Since 2019, he's also owned Indy, both the race track and the IndyCar racing series. I have not heard that he owns the city of Indianapolis, but I wouldn't be surprised. He's exactly the kind of man you'd imagine if somebody described an 87-year-old rich white guy worth $3.6 billion who wears jacket-vests all the time. I think he's probably kind of a jerk in person, but that's just the sense I get from seeing him on TV. I've never met him, so I don't know.
I think a lot of IndyCar fans think he owns too much, and his drivers are seen as part of the Evil Empire. They win a lot, and American sports fans always get ticked off at anybody who wins too much. There's also a sense that if the guy who owns the racing league wins all the time, there must be something nefarious going on. There was, in fact, a big scandal in the air a few weeks before this involving Penske teams and the "push-to-pass" button, which is this stupid thing IndyCars have on road courses that gives them brief spurts of superpowers like it's all some video game. I don't pay attention to IndyCar, though, and I often don't care even a little bit about cheating scandals in sports I do pay attention to, so I don't know whether there was any merit in it. All I know is that Roger Penske owned the first three cars in this race along with the asphalt they drove over, and that if one of those cars won the thing, there'd be a lot of grumpy people in the stands around me.
(This is what literary types call "foreshadowing".)
Tomorrow: An actual race!
www.streetdriventour.com Enjoy coverage from the Street Driven Tour in St. Louis back from July 4th, 2015 at Gateway Motorsports Park.
www.streetdriventour.com Enjoy coverage from the Street Driven Tour in St. Louis back from July 4th, 2015 at Gateway Motorsports Park.
www.streetdriventour.com Enjoy coverage from the Street Driven Tour in St. Louis back from July 4th, 2015 at Gateway Motorsports Park.
www.streetdriventour.com Enjoy coverage from the Street Driven Tour in St. Louis back from July 4th, 2015 at Gateway Motorsports Park.
I was demonstrating how to put a wedding book layout together for my son with some software he was unfamiliar with.
I just grabbed random images from a folder and threw them together.
Tonight, as I was searching for a picture of the day, I came across this one.
I find it interesting.
The images are all taken from my office window.
Driven to fulfill a drive to better my skills, I give you today's image.
By the way, by blog is down. Bitter tears have been shed. I'm working on getting it back up.
I miss it. (Update - Blog is fixed!)
www.streetdriventour.com Enjoy coverage from the Street Driven Tour in St. Louis back from July 4th, 2015 at Gateway Motorsports Park.
www.streetdriventour.com Enjoy coverage from the Street Driven Tour in St. Louis back from July 4th, 2015 at Gateway Motorsports Park.
Driven by Andrew Jarman (GBR) and Jody Fannin (GBR/ZAF) they scored an 8th and 24th (12th in class) at Round 1 of the British GT championship at Oulton Park, Cheshire, UK.