But first: Stick and ball news—

We now enter the busiest time of year for stick and ball sports.

The first players showed up during the weekend at spring training sites in Florida and Arizona, ending an extended winter of discontent in baseball.  Opening day is less than a month away. There will be 162 games with day/night doubleheaders making up for games previously cancelled.

College basketball tournaments are underway for men and women but the main focus, although not the exclusive province of great basketball, the NCAA Tournament, begins tomorrow afternoon.

The USFL is back after a 37-year absence.  Old-timers might remember it played three years, 1983-85 and had grand plans to compete head-to-head with the NFL in the fall of 1986.  But it collapsed before that season could start. The league filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL and won treble damages.  The jury awarded only $1 in damages, which was tripled to three dollars which didn’t do much to offset the $163 million dollars theleague lost.  The planned move to the fall was led by the majority owner of the New Jersey Generals, Donald J. Trump, who thought it would provoke a merger with the NFL.  The new United States Football League owns all of the trademarks of the original league but has no other connection with it. But that’s why we’ll see some names that might ring a bell with those who remember the original.

The National Hockey League still has about six weeks to go before it begins the long, long second season. The Blues are in good shape for the playoffs, second in their division, not likely to catch the Avalanche but hoping to hold off the Wild.

The National Basketball Association, which has former Missouri Tigers Jordan Clarkson and Michael Porter Jr., is a few days less than a month away after which it will compete with the NHL with its long, long second season.  Missouri has not had an NBA team since the Kansas City/Omaha Kings (the former Rochester Seagrams, Rochester Eber Seagrams, Rochester Pros, Rochester Royals, Cincinnati Royals) left town to become the Sacramento Kings in 1985.

And of course there’s golf and tennis and soccer.  And before too long the ground will be warm enough in Missouri for some sand volleyball in our city parks.

Now:  Racing

(NASCAR)—A three-lap shootout with four of NASCAR’s young guns at Phoenix has gone to Chase Briscoe, driving a car owned by his childhood hero, Tony Stewart, and sporting Stewart’s old number—14.  Briscoe had to survive three late-race restarts to get his first Cup win. He finished about eight-tenths of a second ahead of Ross Chastain, Tyler Reddick, and Ryan Blaney. Two of the oldest drivers on the circuit, Kurt Busch, 43, and Kevin Harvick, 46, filled out the top six.

For those keeping track of such things, Briscoe also became the 200^th driver to win a Cup Race in NASCAR’s almost-75 year history.   Harvick’s finish was his 18^th top ten at Phoenix. Only two other drivers in NASCAR history have matched that consistency.  Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt Sr., had eighteen straight top tens at North Wilkesboro, which no longer hosts NASCAR’s top series. Harvick has another streak going that he’d prefer to break sooner rather than later. He hasn’t won a race since September 19, 2020.

The win was an emotional one for last year’s series Rookie of the Year. “I was crying the whole last lap,” he said later. “Just seven years ago I was sleeping on couches, volunteering at race shops and was literally driving home to give up.

Next up for NASCAR is the first race on the newly-redesigned track at Atlanta which has been repaved since last year with progressive banking in the turns.

(INDYCAR)—The second race of the year for America’s premier open-wheel series is this coming weekend at the Texas Speedway.  It will be the first high-speed banked oval run for six rookies.  INDYCAR set up a nine-hour test last week for Kyle Kirkwood, David Malukas, Romain Grosjean, Devlin DeFrancesco, Christian Lundgaard, and Callum Llott.  Grosjean was there voluntarily. He’d done his oval testing last fall at World Wide Technology Raceway across the river from St. Louis. But he took the opportunity to get acquainted with a bigger, faster track.

A quasi-rookie in the race will be seven-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson, who ran only road courses last year.  Most of his NASCAR career was on ovals and he expects to do better than his career-best 17^th place finishes on road courses. Johnson won 83 Cup races, 82 of them on ovals. He’s confident of better things in the five INDYCAR oval races this year after testing on the ovals at Texas and Indianapolis last year.

One of INDYCAR’s hottest young talents has landed a Formula 1test driver job with McLaren. F1 rules allow teams to use one of last year’s cars to test young talent.  If Colton Herta is impressive enough he could land an FP1 opportunity.  Formula 1 requires rookie drivers to have at least two FP1 sessions  before they can race. FP1 lets new drivers get accustomed to the current car in test sessions held before a race with the first session (FP!) focusing on car setups.  FP2 gives experience in simulated long race runs. FP3 lets them work on qualifications laps and more setups. Herta plans to fit those sessions in between his INDYCAR races this year.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 has wrapped up the last pre-season testing with three days on the track at Bahrain. The top rivalry, a carryover from last year’s heated championship run, is still Red Bull vs. Mercedes.  Mercedes turned the most test laps at Bahrain but was short of the top of the speed charts.  Red Bull had the only laps below 1:32. Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton, who lost his chance for a record eighth championship because of a controversial race administration issue last year, says Red Bull looks “ridiculously fast” but he says Mercedes is still the better team.

Red bull driver, defending champion Max Verstappen thinks Mercedes wasn’t showing its full capability during the tests.

The season opens Sunday on the Bahrain circuit.

(Photo credits: Bob Priddy)

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(NASCAR)—Defending NASCAR champion Kyle Larson has charged from the rear of the starting field to notch his first win of the year, hanging on to a late lead to lead oncoming Austin Dillon by just under two-tenths of a second.

Larson was sent to the back because of unapproved adjustments to his car and needed 167 laps to surge into the lead, past Joey Logano, with only 33 laps left.

Tyler Reddick had dominated much of the race but a flat rear tire on the 152^nd lap dashed his hopes.  He led 90 of the first 151 laps but finished a lap down in 24^th place.

Larson teammate Chase Elliott challenged him for the lead but Larson moved up the track while dueling with Joe Logano and pinched Elliott against the outside wall.  Larson said on his radio he didn’t know Elliott was there.

Erik Jones and Daniel Suarez rounded out the top five.

Austin Cindric, the rookie winner of the Daytona 500 a week earlier, started on the poll and was 12^th at the end.

(INDYCAR)—Scott McLaughlin, a driver from down under has started the INDYCAR season atop the INDYCAR World.  McLaughlin, in his second full season for Penske after winning three championships in Australian V8 Supercar racing, started from P1, led almost half the laps on the St. Petersburg (Florida) road course and took the checkered flag half a second ahead of defending INDYCAR champion Alex Palou. The win is his first in the INDYCAR series.  Teammate Will Power got the last podium spot.

McLaughlin averaged almost 97 mph on the fourteen-turn 1.8-mile temporary street circuit.

McLaughlin, a New Zealand native whose family moved to Australia when he was 9, began his racing career at the age of six, driving go karts. He won his first championship three years later. In his first full season in INDYCAR last year, he had five top tens in sixteen races, with a runner-up finish at Texas his best result. He was the Indianapolis 500 rookie of the year.

The race was the first February INDYCAR race since 2003. INDYCAR has sixteen more races to run but won’t run its second race until March 20, at Texas. Another three-week layoff will lead to the third race of the year, at Long Beach, California.

(Photo Credit: Bob Priddy, McLaughlin at World Wide Technology Raceway)

(We reserve Tuesday for sports, usually sports that involve brightly-decorated cars going by very fast. Occasionally we might mention stick-and-ball sports, too)

(NASCAR)—Rookie Austin Cindric displayed a veteran’s cool in a two-lap overtime shootout to win the Daytona 500 Sunday night. Only fifteen of the forty starting cars completed the race and many of those cars were battered in one or more of the five major crashes that Cindric avoided.

One of those battered cars was driven by Bubba Wallace, who came within 37-thousandths of a second (about three feet) of winning.  It’s the second time Wallace had come within a few feet of winning NASCAR’s most prestigious race.

The win was a double celebration for team owner Roger Penske, who observed his 85^th birthday Sunday.

Cindric is the son of the Tim Cindric, the president of Team Penske, and has grown up in the Penske culture. He’s well spoken and seemed to modulate the emotions of winning the Daytona 500: “To be able to say that I’ve been able to accomplish this, there’s nothing more important to me than racing. There’s nothing more important to me than being part of this sport. And to think that I’m a Daytona 500 winner, you can’t take that away.”

Cindric inherited the #2 Penske ride when Brad Keselowski left to become part owner and driver of what is now Roush-Fenway-Keselowski racing.

Keselowski had help from Cindric who pushed him into the lead on the first lap, the first of 67 laps he led in the race.  But Keselowski’s luck varied throughout the race. On the 61^st lap he was pushing rookie Harrison Burton down the backstretch when Burton’s car went sideways and flipped onto its roof before rolling back on its wheels. The crash collected seven other cars. Keselowski pushed Ricky Stenhouse’s car too hard with five laps left, triggering another multi-car wreck.  He finished the race ninth after a collision with David Ragan and Michael McDowell racing for the checkered flag.

(INDYCAR)—INDYCAR opens its season next Sunday on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida. All 26 drivers and teams got in their last pre-season tests last week at Sebring. The series has five former champions in the field including Alex Palou, who took home the big trophy last year, six-time champion Scott Dixon who wants to tie A. J. Foyt’s record of seven titles, Joseph Newgarden who will shoot for his third season championship, along with Simon Pagenaud and Will Power, who have won once each.

Four-time Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves will be in a Meyer-Shank car for the entire season. Also in the series is two time 500-winner Takuma Sato along with Alexander Rossi, Power, Pagenaud, and Dixon, who have won the big race once each. The Formula 1 contingent has grown to four—Marcus Ericsson, Romain Grosjean, Sato, and Rossi.  And back for his second season, this time on ovals as well as road courses, is seven-time NASCAR champ Jimmie Johnson.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 doesn’t start its season until next month.

(photo credit: Getty Images/NASCAR)

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(FORMLA 1)—The tracks of the three major racing series we follow are cold and silent, not to feel the heat and the rumble for a couple of months.  But Formula 1 ended the racing year with a memorable event—and the way it ended hasn’t ended it.

One race. Last lap.  Two drivers tied in the championship standings fighting tooth and toenail for the championship—one to set a record for most titles and the other in search of his first championship trophy.

Lewis Hamilton had the lead going for F1 championship number eight until a late crash brought out the caution car. Max Verstappen was running second but behind five lapped cars but race stewards allowed the five lapped cars to go around the safety car and take positions at the back of the field during the caution.  Verstappen stopped for tires during the caution while Hamilton stayed out and the two were side by side for the restart.

Ride with the two drivers in this video from Formula 1—

https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/video.side-by-side-verstappen-and-hamiltons-final-lap-shootout-for-drivers-title.1718961184355366048.html

Hamilton jumped into the early lead but on the fifth turn of the sixteen-corner circuit, Verstappen snatched the lead for the first time in the entire race.  Hamilton tried to take it back on the ninth turn but couldn’t get it and Verstappen won by more than two seconds.

Although the victory celebration began on the track and later on the podium, Vertappen had to wait four hours before F1 officials dismissed claims by Hamilton’s Mercedes team director that the last lap had been started improperly.

FIA race director Michael Masi made the decision to allow the five lapped cars to unlap themselves on the same lap that the race was resumed. Some observers say Masi’s decision, after strong lobbying by Verstappen’s Red Bull team leader, was contrary to the rules.

Although stewards rejected the Mercedes protest, Mercedes has indicated it might appeal the verdict. It has 96 hours after the end of the race to file that appeal.  But as we write this, Max Verstappen is considered the race, and championship winner.

There are reports, however, that the controversy will cost Michael Masi his job. The FIA, the sanctioning body of F1, will meet December to elect a new president, replacing Jean Todt,who is stepping down after twelve years.  A decision about Masi’s future could be made then.

(INDYCAR)—-INDYCAR lost Al Unser Sr., last week.  Unser, who died last Thursday, was the second four-time winner of the Indianapolis 500, a feat accomplished previously only by A. J. Foyt. He was 82 and had been fighting cancer for the last seventeen years.

Unser ran his first 500 in 1965 and is one of the few drivers with back-to-back victories (1970-71). He led 190 of the race’s 200 laps in his first win. He also won in 1978 and got his final victory in 1987 when he became the oldest winner in Indianapolis 500 history.  Since then, Rick Mears and Helio Castroneves have joined the “four-time” club.

Although he had left the 2021 race to fly home before Castroneves became the fourth four-time winner, Unser took a break from his cancer treatments to fly back to Indianapolis for a special photograph July 20 of the four four-time winners with the Borg-Warner Trophy at the yard of bricks (L-R: Foyt, Unser, Mears, Castroneves).

Unser led more laps than any other driver in the race’s history. His 27 starts are the third-most in race history. He retired in 1994.

His older brother, Bobby, was 87 when he died last May. Bobby won the 500 three times.

Al Unser Jr., won the race twice.

The Unsers opened a museum in their hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico to house the cars they raced, the cars they collected (including the cars the Unser family achieved its earliest fame with by winning races to the top of Pike’s Peak), and the plaques showing the nine “Baby Borgs” they won at Indianapolis—plaques showing miniature versions of the famous 500 trophy—and hundreds of other awards.

Al Senior was at the museum often and would meet visitors and share his memories and his visitor’s memories—as he did a few years ago with this writer.

(NASCAR)—Richard Petty has sold controlling interest in Richard Petty Motorsports to Maury Gallagher, the owner of GMS Racing.  The company will be rebranded Petty GMS Motorsports with Petty remaining as Chairman—and the face of—the company. The team will field two cars next year with Erik Jones driving the 43, Richard’s old number that he carried to seven NASCAR titles—and Ty Dillon bringing the number 42 back to the track—the number Richard’s father, Lee, campaigned with in the early days of NASCAR and with which he won three championships.

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With cars in the garages, engines and tires cold for the winter, this column is entering its off-season, too.  We’ll resume whenthe roar returns.                                                                                                      (photo credit:  Chris Owens, INDYCAR)

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(FORMULA 1)—The intensity of their rivalry has been building all season and their rivalry is white-hot as Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen prepare to slug it out in the final race in Formula 1 next weekend. It’s the last race of the year for the three big-time series we follow.

Hamilton’s third straight win, at the new Saudia Arabia course, has drawn him into a points tie with Max Verstappen with everything on the line next weekend in Abu Dhabi.

Only once before in the sport’s 72 year history have two competitors entered the final race tied in the points. Emerson Fittipaldi and Clay Reggazoni went into 1974’s last race tied. Fittipaldi finished fourth in the race but Regazzoni had handling problems and finished 11^th, a lap down, giving Fittipaldi his second Formula One title.                  .

The Saudi Arabia Grand Prix included numerous yellow lights and two red-light stoppages, bumping, shortcuts through turns, a nose-to-tail collision between the two top competitors, and a penalty that forced Verstappen to give back the lead to Hamilton with six laps left. Verstappen was not able to threaten Hamilton the rest of the way.

The front wing of Hamilton’s car was damaged when Verstappen suddenly braked on a straightaway.  Verstappen said after the race he did it to obey race stewards’ demand that he let Hamilton pass him because of an improper short-cutting of a corner that let Verstappen keep Hamilton out of the lead.  Hamilton said nobody had told him Verstappen was going to suddenly brake.

Hamilton drove the rest of the way with a damaged right front wing and turned the fastest lap of the race despite it.

(NASCAR)—NASCAR has crowned its first minority Cup champion—Kyle Larson, the grandson of Japanese internment camp inmates during World War II, also is the first graduate of the NASCAR Drive for Diversity program to win the championship.

In his extraordinary season, he won ten races, the first driver since Jimmie Johnson in 2007 top post a double-digit victory total. Larson demolished the record for most points in the playoff series previously held by Martin Truex Jr.  He led more laps (2,581) than any driver since 1995. In leading 28% of the laps in all of his races, he became the first NASCAR driver to get to that mark since Missouri’s Rusty Wallace did it in 1993.

At the championship banquet, Larson paid tribute to his wife, Katelyn, who helped him survive his suspension from Cup racing for most of 2020: “We didn’t know where our lives were headed but you always kept the family strong,” he said. “We packed up the motor home and hit the road for months at a time with our crazy children while we tried to figure those things out…Those hard times made me a better person and made us a stronger family.”

He also told team owner Rick Hendrick, who took a chance on him when the suspension was lifted, “This year you taught me so much about respect and how to treat people.”

Larson’s championship was the fourteenth for Hendrick Motorsports.  Hendrick also has more Cup victories than any other team in NASCAR history.

(INDYCAR)—McLaren Racing has increased its commitment to INDYCAR by increasing its ownership share in the Arrow McLaren SP racing team.  McLaren has taken over majority ownership of what has been Smith-Peterson Motorsports. Sam Schmidt and Ric Peterson will remain on the team’s board of directors. McLaren Racing CEO Zak Bown will be the Chairman of the five-member board.

McLaren Racing, founded by Bruce McLaren in 1963, has twenty Formula 1 Championships and three Indianapolis 500s. It will expand into Extreme E racing next year, an all-electric off-road series.

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And light 70 candles for Rick Mears, who hit the three score and ten mark last Friday. Mears won 29 of the 202 INDYCAR series starts. He started from the pole in about one-in-five of those races.  He is one of four drivers in Indianapolis 500 history to have his face on the Borg-Warner trophy four times. Eleven of his Indianapolis 500s starts came from the front row, six times from the pole.  Half of the times he started P1 he finished there.

(Photo of Kyle and Katelyn Larson from NASCAR/Chris Gaythen-Getty Images)

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—NASCAR is going back to its long weekends.

Practice and qualifying, which have been casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic for most of the last two seasons, will return in 2022.  NASCAR had eliminated practice and qualifying for most races because of the need to cut back on the number of people at the track during the social-distancing era.

But qualifying is being changed to the knockout format.

Much of the new format is designed to give more broadcast time to FOX, NBC and other broadcast partners.

The announcement has come as NASCAR heads for its championship week, which starts in Nashville a week from today and goes through December 2.  The week not only will recognize NASCAR champions in its three touring series, it also will honor champions in three ARCA series, NASCAR’s Modified Tour champion and the Weekly Series national champion.

NASCAR has held special awards ceremonies for forty years, beginning in New York in 1981, continuing in Nashville in 2009, and moving to Nashville in 2019.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen has become the hunted.  Lewis Hamilton has become the hunter—and shows signs of being a relentless one.

Hamilton led from start to finish in the inaugural Qatar Grand Prix to finish 26 seconds ahead of Verstappen, his second straight win over the F1 points leader.  The win cuts Verstappen’s points lead to just eight, with two races left on the schedule.  Mercedes team leader Toto Wolff says the previous race’s penalties that relegated Hamilton to the last starting position, from which he charged to victory, “have woken up the lion.”

“He’s absolutely on it—brutal, and cold-blooded,” he said.

Hamilton was 19 points back after Verstappen had won two straight races.

Two-time Formula 1 Champion Fernando Alonso snagged the final podium finish, his first since 2014. F1’s statisticians say his 105 races between podium finishes is a record and says he’s only the third driver older than 40 in the last 35 years to have finished in one of the top three positions in a race.

F1’s season finishes with races in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.

(INDYCAR)—Put the name of Alexander Rossi in the racing history books as the only driver to win an Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 24 hours, and the Baja 1000 off-road race.

His “wild ride” (his term) victory in the 54^th Baja, the most prestigious off-road race in North America, came at the wheel of a highly-modified Honda Ridgeline was shared with three other drivers and a navigator. The race is 1,226 miles long, from Ensenada, California to Lapaz, Mexico. He described the ride as “equally chaotic, awesome and terrifying.”

He also used the words “insane” and “really cool” in describing his drive in the daylight and the dark and the ocean fog—and in the dust from hundreds of other vehicles in the race.

Rossi’s overnight stint covered 251 miles and built his team’s lead to 100 miles.

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This year’s Indianapolis 500 winner, Helio Castroneves, who returns to fulltime driving in the INDYCAR series next year, is not abandoning the sports car racing that he has done for the last couple of years.  He’ll drive Meyer Shank Racing entries in both open wheel and sports car races in 2022, running the full INDYCAR schedule and picking up stints in MSR sports cars in the four endurance races on the IMSA circuit.  He’ll try to be a repeat winner in the Daytona 24. He was part of the winning team with Wayne Taylor racing this year.

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When we talked with INDYCAR President Jay Frye in August, we talked about the hybrid powerplants coming to the series in 2023. But Frye suggest it will be a long time, at the least, before the internal combustion engine disappears from INDYCAR.

But if electric-only cars are far off in the series, electric car drivers might not be.  Two Formula E teammates from Europe will test INDYCARS on December 6 at Sebring.  Stoffel Vandoorne and Nyck deVries, teammates in the Mercedes EQ Formula E program will be in cars from the Arrow-McLaren and the Meyer Shank racing stables.  DeVries won the Formula E championship for 2020-21.  Vandoorne was second in the 2019-20 Formula E Season and ninth in the most recent season.  Mercedes is withdrawing from Formula E.

(Photo Credit: Bob Priddy)

by Bob Priddy, Missourinet

Before we launch into covering the only remaining major racing series still generating heat, we pause to mark the death of champion driver-turned-teacher Bob Bondurant, who helped teach race driver-wanna-be people such as Paul Newman, James Garner, and Clint Eastwood how to drive a race car and who taught racers such as Dale Earnhardt, Sr., and Jeff Gordon how to fling a stock car around a road course.

Bondurant was 88 when he died during the weekend in Paradise Valley, Arizona.

He won a world sports car championship while driving Cobras for Carroll Shelby (right) in Europe.  He founded the Bondurant Racing School after a His Lola T70 Mark II broke a steering arm at 150 mph in a 1967 Can-Am race at Watkins Glen and flipped eight times.  Bondurant suffered serious back, rib, leg and foot injuries and was told he might never walk again.

But he did and in 1968 founded his racing school that is now considered the top racing school in the world.

And he kept racing.  And winning.  His last championship was in the 1997 World Cup challenge.  He ran his last race at the age of 79—and won—driving and ERA reproduction of the GT40.

His school filed for bankruptcy in 2018, was sold earlier this year, and is now known as the Radford Racing School.

While NASCAR is planning its championship celebration to be held next month in Nashville and INDYCAR is in its silly season of team realignments, Formula 1’s closest championship contest in years is down to its last three races.

(FORMULA1)—Lewis Hamilton overcame two major setbacks to win his 101^st career grand prix by running down points leader Max Verstappen in the Brazilian Grand Prix, getting past him and pulling away to a ten-second win.  Some observers think it is one of his greatest races.

Hamilton led all qualifiers but was penalized for a rear wing rule violation and started Saturday’s qualifying race dead last, 20^th.  He sprinted to fifth place at the end. But then he had to take a five-place starting grid penalty for an engine change that buried him midway in the pack, tenth, for Sunday’s race.

Hamilton climbed to second behind Verstappen and the two spent several laps in intense competition before Hamilton got past his rival on the 59^th lap of the 71-lap race.

“This has definitely been one of the best weekends, if not the best weekend I’ve experienced, probably, in my whole career,” he said afterward.

Hamilton’s win comes at a time when Verstappen was in position to build a strong points lead. Instead, he has seen Hamilton cut his 19-points lead cut to 14 with three races left, two of them in Qatar and Saudi Arabia on new tracks on which neither driver has competed, and their in Abu Dhabi on a track that has been changed since they drove on it.

(Picture Credit: Bob Bondurant Official Fan Page)

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—There are all kinds of clichés that tell the story of Kyle Larson’s NASCAR Cup championship this year:

—from the outhouse to the penthouse

—outcast to king

—when one window closes, another opens.

—Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement.

So on and so forth. Don’t call it a “Cinderella story” either.  Cinderella and her pumpkin/coach have no comparison to what Kyle Larson and his team did this year in a sport that is too tough for sloppy sentimental comments and fairy tales.

A year ago, Kyle Larson watched NASCAR’s championship race from North Carolina, sitting out his indefinite suspension for using a racial slur during a computerized race during the temporary pandemic shutdown of Cup racing.

At Phoenix he did what Kevin Harvick couldn’t do last year—seal a championship deal.  Like Harvick, Larson had nine victories, going into the final race. Unlike Harvick, who had not made the final four despite all those win last year, Larson was there and snagged his tenth win and the championship.  Eleven wins if you count the non-points all-star race.

He’s the first Cup champion since Jimmie Johnson in 2007 to have ten more wins and only the seventh NASCAR champion in almost fifty years that are considered the modern era with ten wins or more.

(Jeff Gordon in 1998 and Richard Petty in 1975 have the record, 13.)

Larson, running fourth with the other title contenders, Chase Elliott, Martin Truex Jr., and Denny Hamlin, ahead of him took the lead when his pit crew turned in its second-fastest stop of the year. He beat Denny Hamlin on the restart and then had to hold off Martin Truex Jr., for the last 24 laps to claim the championship by four-tenths of a second.  Hamlin finished third and last year’s champion, Chase Elliott, came home fifth, edged out by Ryan Blaney.

Hamlin remains the active driver with the most wins who has never won a championship. His 46 wins trails only Junior Johnson’s 50. (Incidentally, Columbia’s Carl Edwards ranks fifth with 28 victories. He finished second twice.)

Larson feared his career among elite big-time racing drivers might have been over last year.  But Rick Hendrick watched as he quietly worked to redeem himself and signed him to drive in 2021 after NASCAR reinstated him.

He is the first minority champion in NASCAR history as the first Asian-American (his mother is Japanese-American) and the first graduate of NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity program to win the NASCAR Cup, a status significant in light of last year’s events.

“I didn’t even think I’d be racing a Cup car a year and a half ago,” Larson said after the win. “to win a championship is crazy.”  After thanking Hendrick and co-owner Jeff Gordon and NASCAR, among others, He told interviewers “Without my pit crew on that last stop, we would not be standing right here. They are the true winners of this race. They are true champions. I’m blessed to be part of this group. Every single man and woman at Hendrick Motorsports, this win is for all of us, and every one of you.  This is unbelievable.”

(FORMULA1)—The last of the major motorsports championships won’t be decided for another month but Max Verstappen has made it clear it’s his to lose.  Verstappen’s 16-second in over rival Lewis Hamilton extends his points lead to 19 points with four races left.

Sergio Perez, Verstappen’s teammate, grabbed third place to become the first Mexican driver to land a podium finish in the history of the Mexican Grand Prix.

Verstappen seized the lead on the first turn although starting third when pole sitter Valtteri Bottas and Hamilton gave him room on the preferred outside line. With late braking, he stormed past the first two starters and gave up the lead only during pit stops.

(INDYCAR)—INDYCAR will return to the streets of downtown Detroit for the first time since 1991 when the Detroit Grand Prix moves from Belle Isle Park in 2023.  INDYCAR competitors ran on a temporary downtown circuit in 1989-91.  They’ll run at Belle Isle next year. The series ran two races there this year with Marcus Ericsson an Pato O’Ward the winners. Only one race will be run there in 2022 as INDYCAR makes adjustments to its schedule.

(Photo Credit: NASCAR/Christian Peterson, Getty Images)