500 vs. 600, again
Yesterday I promised a contrarian take on Sunday's races.
I banged out a whole long post last night and cut a big chunk of it this morning because I'm struggling to compare the two. Really, there is no comparison. The Co-cola 600 is one of 36 races in a very long Nextel Cup season.
The Indy 500 is an event, sort of like the Kentucky Derby. Everyone's a horse racing fan for a day just like everyone's an open wheel fan for a day. Which is why I'm going to tee off on it.
Sure, this year's Indy 500 was a close race - 0.0635 separated Sam Hornish Jr. from Marco Andretti. But the first 180 laps or so of the race reminded me of the sad state of open-wheel racing.
Consider how much more competitive the 600 was than the 500. Co-cola 600 results are here. Indy 500 results are here. The Cup race had a higher percentage of drivers finishing on the lead lap (40% to 30%), a higher percentage of finishers within 5 laps of the leader (77% to 45%) and a higher percentage of finishers (86% to 60%).
That also suggests that there were a lot of Indy drivers who had no business racing there. Thiago Medeiros, who finished last in his one previous IndyCar start, qualified 13 mph slower than Hornish. Teammates Jeff Bucknam (22nd in 2005 500) and P.J. Chesson (247 laps of IndyCar experience before Sunday) wrecked each other on Lap 2. Two-time winner Al Unser Jr. hadn't raced in two years. P.J. Jones, the guy who shows up at Watkins Glen every so often, was good enough to finish 19th.
Larry Foyt, fercryinoutloud, drove at Indy, the same Larry Foyt who could manage a way to finish 52nd in a 43-car Cup fiend. Foyt had a top 30 finish at Indy only because there were three drivers sorrier than he was. That's hard to do.
Here's the baffling thing: Everyone is using the same Honda engines. Unless some of those engines are made out of duct tape and pieces from an old Erector set, I don't understand why there's such a speed difference. Some of those cars looked like they were standing still. When a freshly wrecked Buddy Rice complained he was lapping the same cars every four laps, I don't think he was exaggerating by much.
What I'm getting at is this: Go ahead and remember the thrilling finish, but don't take your eyes off the sorry spectacle that led up to it. I'll be an open wheel fan every Memorial Day, but I still can't muster up the energy to care the other 364 days of the year.
Of course, if you're a NASCAR fan, continue to look at the dark side of everything. When you think of last year's 600, do you remember the thrilling finish or the crummy tires?
That's what I thought.
Comments (3)
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Tony George got lucky with the finish. He no doubt had people over the heads out there and he is lucky no one was killed this year.
Humpy Wheeler will get Charlotte straightened out.
Open wheel is just a mess and will stay that way until a merger of the two series.
Posted on June 1, 2006 8:51 PM
So I hadn't wandered over here in a few days and missed this post. I know you promised a contrarian viewpoint, but I can't help from responding. There's a couple things here that you're just way off on.
Comparing the number of drivers running and those on the lead lap is no way to analyze which race was better unless you take into account the inherent differences in the series. And even then, I'm not sure it's a good measure.
Here's why: 10 cars on the lead lap is historically a big number for the 500. It'd be a low number for a typical NASCAR race. Indycars run considerably faster, creating greater opportunity to lap slower cars in an equally distanced race. Heck many of the greatest 500s only had two, three or four cars on the lead lap at the finish (See 1992, 1991, 1982, 1974).
Comparing how many cars are running is similarly flawed. IndyCars can't rub. They touch the wall, they're done. They touch each other, chances are they're done. You can take your stock car into the garage and repair serious damage and then come back out onto the track. This also goes to the first stat, the less cars can stay out with damage, the less likely they are to stay on the lead lap.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know. But acting like those numbers are apples to apples is silly. They're not.
If you want to compare numbers, I'd say look at the lead changes. I wouldn't be surprised if the 600 had more, especially with Dan Wheldon dominating the first two hours of the 500, but I think that's something that's more easily compared across the two series.
You can't be serious picking on Larry Foyt's 30-place finish? There are only 33 cars in the field and he would've taken his normal spot in the bottom two if PJ Chesson and Jeff Bucknum hadn't beaten him -- by wrecking on the first lap -- to being the two cars to crash out first.
Everyone is on Honda power, but not all the drivers are using the same chasis. The Panoz body is clearly sub-par this year. Rahal-Letterman (eg Danica Patrick and Buddy Rice) is switching next week -- a move they should've made before the 500.
This year's 500 was a great race from start to finish. Even when Wheldon was out front for the first 140 laps or so, there was plenty of good racing going on behind him. And that Wheldon-Kanaan shootout around 150 was awesome. The last 20 laps, among the best I've seen in the 20-odd years I've been watching the 500.
Has the 600 been better over the last seven, eight years? Yes. But the last two 500s have been about as good as Indy gets and better than the 600 for my money.
Mark, that's a ridiculous statement about being lucky no one died. No driver has been killed during the 500 in 33 years. And there were plenty of years where the field had much less talent and experience than this year's. See the first five or six post-split races. Heck, AJ IV is thankfully in NASCAR, providing plenty of relief for IndyCar drivers.
Sorry John for the long rant. As an IndyCar fan in NASCAR country, I usually bite my tongue and let it roll off. But that was too good of a 500 to argue was worse than the Charlotte race, in my opinion.
Posted on June 4, 2006 8:07 PM
Thanks for the long reply, Jonathan. I didn't realize the Panoz chassis was junk. And thanks for the history lesson - no, I didn't realize that the 500 used to be even less competitive than it was 10-20 years ago.
If you dig back through NASCAR's history, you'll see something similar - 3 or 4 (or 5 or 6) cars finishing on the lead lap, and a lot of drivers watching from the garage. That's just not good racing. NASCAR has recently placed more emphasis (rightly, in my view) on the driver than the car. That means the racing is better, the competition is deeper and more people will pay attention.
I mean, how many people are going to root for Larry Foyt (and buy his stuff and support his sponsors) if you know he's going to be 5 laps down halfway through the race? The Midwest already has the Cubs. I don't think they're looking to expand their franchise on futility.
Sorry for the Larry Foyt blast, Jonathan, but NASCAR got rid of him and IRL got him back. (Look for AJ4 in the 500 next year - in seven Busch races, he finished no better than 33rd on an oval track and got canned.) I think his presence in the field bolsters my point that open-wheeled racing's biggest event of the year is overflowing with field fillers. That's just not the sign of a healthy racing series. Neither is racing at Watkins Glen, for that matter. ;)
All that said, I'd love to see a better open-wheeled series in the US, with 20-25 competitive drivers. Maybe CART will finally die and this will be so. The Indy 500 and open-wheel racing deserve better.
Posted on June 5, 2006 11:07 AM