Category Archives: Sports

Who should control sports wagering?

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Kurt Erickson’s article in last Friday’s Post-Dispatch should be a warning that the state’s control of casino gambling is in danger.

Erickson wrote that four of our professional sports teams are launching a petition campaign to legalize sports wagering, an issue the legislature has talked about for several years but has been unable to get out of its own way and approve.

The St. Louis Cardinals, the St. Louis Blues, the Kansas City Royals, and the St. Louis City soccer club have filed nine proposed petitions with the Secretary of State. One of them will become the focus of a campaign to amend the constitution to allow sports wagering. The proposals also establish various tax rates and earmark revenues from sports wagering.

Some of the proposals will lower the overall tax on casino gambling by creating a super-low rate on sports wagering revenues. The proposals also change the way funds from gambling taxes are allocated.

Both are issues of legislative concern—-and of concern to educators in particular.  Both are issues the legislature dealt with in the 1990s when casino gambling was first legalized. The earmarking of funds from casino gambling has been a legislative prerogative from the beginning. The legislature changed the earmarks once, moving portions of casino admission fees from support for early childhood education to support for nursing homes and cemetery development for Missouri veterans.

Legislative leaders need to protect the general assembly’s authority to determine the best interests of the people of Missouri—the people who send their representatives and senators to the capitol on their behalf.

The only way to do that is to approve sports wagering during the 2022 legislative session.

The BEST way to do that is to recognize that casino gambling laws enacted in the 1990s are no longer adequate thirty years later at a time when casino gambling as an industry and  public access to casino gambling are changing.

Additionally, it is time the legislature recognize that the two-dollar admission fee established in 1993 has become a multi-million dollar liability to the state and to the casinos’ own host communities.

Proposed legislation has been written, but not introduced, that addresses all of those topics.  One of the major provisions is increasing the admission fee to a contemporary amount that is the equivalent of 1993’s two dollars. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says the equivalent for this fiscal year is $3.67.  A new estimate will be released in February, during the legislative session.

The proposed legislation increases the admission fee to $3.50, leaving seventeen cents unclaimed.

The proposed legislation increases the admission fee to $3.50.  We know the casinos will vehemently oppose this provision because they like to keep a dollar-67 in 2021 dollars for every two 1993 dollars they give the state (which have a purchasing power of only a dollar and nine cents now). They’re happy getting richer and richer while the state gets poorer and poorer

The proposal leaves seventeen cents unclaimed. The filing of the possible petitions has prompted a suggestion for the remaining seventeen cents.

We know from past experience that the private owners of professional sports teams will expect the legislature to put up state taxpayer funds to help pay for a new stadium. The tub-thumping for a downtown Kansas City Royals stadium is well-underway, in fact. The state does not have the major funds the teams want it to commit without cutting funding for other state programs.  A provision not yet in the suggested gambling reform bill could direct the unclaimed seventeen cents into a state fund for construction and renovation of professional athletic facilities, alleviating the inevitable pressure on the state for help with new professional facilities.

With wagering being permitted on sports, it is only proper that part of the proceeds from that activity be directed in that direction.

One reason sports wagering legislation has struggled and foundered in past legislative sessions is the effort to bring so-called grey-market gambling machines in convenience stores under state regulation. Efforts to make the two issues run in tandem have been counterproductive.

There is no doubt that it is important the state regulate those machines. But the stakes have been increased enough on sports wagering with the proposed petition campaign that the two issues should be separated and sports wagering should be a higher priority.

Nothing in what has been written today should be considered as opposing either sports wagering or regulation of the grey market convenience store machines. The author does not oppose either but does believe our gambling laws are outdated and are costing the programs the state once promised would be funded by those taxes and fees tens of millions of dollars a year.

The governor and the legislature have many issues to consider as priorities in the 2022 session. One of them is changing the law to make it harder to circulate petitions. We hope that issue will not obscure the importance of the sports wagering effort.

The proposed petition campaign should make state authority to regulate gaming and to appropriate the proceeds from it one of the major issues as a stand-alone matter that will not be endangered by other issues.

One Race, Four Drivers Left

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(NASCAR)—-Four losers at Martinsville this weekend will race for the biggest win in NASCAR at  Phoenix next weekend.

Alex Bowman bumped Denny Hamlin out of the lead in with six laps (about three miles) left in the race and beat Kyle Busch and Brad Keselowski to the line for the win.  Busch and Keselowski had to win to make the championship four.

Hamlin, who has never won the Cup championship, still makes the final four. So does defending champion Chase Elliott, Martin Truex Jr., the 2017 champion, and Kyle Larson, who has more wins this year than any other driver.

Bowman’s win at Martinsville is his fourth this year. Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano join Busch and Keselowski as the four semi-finalists who didn’t make it to the last round.

Racing on the half-mile track crowded with 38 stock cars always produces some raw nerve, even when seven drivers are not competing for the three remaining slots in the championship race—Larson was guaranteed one of the final four positions because of wins in the two previous races.

Hamlin did not take the incident with Bowman well, calling him “a hack,” although Bowman has twice as many wins this year as Hamlin, and “just terrible.”  Bowman says the incident was accidental, caused by too much speed going into the corner, forcing his car up the rack slightly to hit Hamlin.

(INDYCAR)—Plenty of action on the track, but competition.  INDYCAR teams have been testing various car-driver combinations but no significant signings have been reported for several days.  The new season starts February 27 on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, the earliest season-start for INDYCAR in several years.

FORMULA 1)—Four races will decide the winner of one of the tightest championship races in recent memory.  The Mexico Grand Prix will be run next weekend.

 

Racing: Larson is first of four

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by Bob Priddy  Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—NASCAR’s hottest driver of 2021 has guaranteed himself a shot at the Cup championship.  Kyle Larson held off teammate William Byron through restart after restart to win the last 500-mile race of the year, finishing half a second in front at Texas Speedway. It’s his eighth win of the year and makes him the first driver assured of being one of four drivers to race for the championship at Phoenix November 7.

Larson, who led 256 of the 334 laps could not get Byron out of his rear view mirror in several restarts in the last phase of the race. Although he dominated the race, six restarts in the last race stage—four of them in the last 30 laps—challenged him to get the break ahead of the bunched-up field before the driver in the outside lane, usually Byron, could nose ahead. Christopher Bell, Brad Keselowski, and Kevin Harvick rounded out the top five in the race.  Bell and Harvick dropped out of playoff picture last week.

Three drivers among the eight semi-finalists filled the next three positions at Texas: Ryan Blaney, defending champion Chase Elliott, and Kyle Busch. Denny Hamlin kept his championship hopes alive despite a spin with 21 laps left that dropped him to last among cars on the leader’s lap and a crash with seven laps remaining. His pit crew kept his car operable and he brought it home 11th.  Fifteen cars finished on the lead lap.

The eighth contender, Joey Logano, suffered a rare engine failure and wound up 30th, putting him in a must-win situation in the remaining two races of this playoff stage if he is to contend for the championship.

Larson, Blaney, Hamlin, and Busch hold the top four spots. Elliott is five points below the cut line. Brad Keselowski trails by 15. Martin Truex Jr., who left the race with twenty laps left, is down 22. Logano is eighth.

The playoffs continue at the Kansas Speedway next Sunday.

(INDYCAR)—Alex Palou, the new INDYCAR champion, won his championship on a road course he’d never visited before.  But he had driven the course a lot.

Palou, on Dale Earnhardt Junior’s podcast (IndyCar Champion Alex Palou: “You Get More Into Fights Than Us” – YouTube), explained, “I’d never been there. It’s like the most important race of my life.”   So he want iRacing—driving a computer program that simulated the Long Beach track.  ‘I needed as many laps as possible. I think I did driving, like, 17-18 hours” in one day.

He went into the race with a healthy lead in points and had to finish only eleventh to clinch the trophy. He finished fourth to become the first Spaniard to win an INDYCAR title, the seventh youngest champion and the first driver younger than 25 to win a championship since teammate Scott Dixon got the first of his six eighteen years ago (he’s 24).

Palou has a special diet when he wins a race—a big chicken dinner.  He told USA Today’s “For the Win” podcast that the custom began when he was racing in Japan where “you don’t have the food we normally have…So the only thing that was similar was Spanish food—and it was bad food for you; it’s not salad—it was fried chicken. And I love friend chicken…So it was a perfect fit.”

Since winning the championship, he’s been making a lot of appearances and “I think I’ve had loads of fried chicken.”

He has also had a chance to see a different kind of racing close-up.  He was at Charlotte earlier this month for the race on the Charlotte Roval, the combination of oval and road course. “There is nothing close to a NASCAR stock car,” he said.  The car is huge. It’s mind-blowing. It’s a really big car.  That is what makes NASCAR so amazing on track—lots of weight, lots of power. It’s difficult for the drivers to handle.”

Would he like to strap in one?  Of course. He’s a racer.  But just for some test laps.  Open-wheel racing is still his thing.

(FORMULA 1)—No wheels turned in competition in F1 this week.  Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton renew their hot rivalry for the championship Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas near Austin, Texas. Verstappen took a six-point lead on Hamilton at the Turkish Grand Prix a week ago.

Formula 1 has six races left this year, including Austin. It finishes up on December 12 in Abu Dhabi.

(picture credits: Bob Priddy and Dirty Mo Media/Youtube).

 

 

 

Racing:  Eight Remain in the Hunt

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—-From sixteen to twelve, and now only eight drivers remain in the fight for NASCAR’s 2021 Cup championship.

Adding color to the competition are two guys, one still in the championship hunt and one who knocked himself out of it in the cutdown race at the Charlotte Roval.

Kyle Larson climbed all the way to the winner’s circle after an early race mishap, getting his seventh win of the year.  He has the top seed in the three-race series that will cut the final competitors to four for the last race of the year.

Larson’s alternator lost its belt and his battery started going flat at the end of the second stage of the race. But his pit crew put in a new battery and put on a new alternator belt—without losing a lap. However, he had dropped from 6th to 36th when he got back on the track. But he carved his way through the field and back into the top ten with 31 laps left and was second with eleven laps left. He got past Denny Hamlin for the lead with eight laps left and beat Tyler Reddick to the flag by about eight-tenths of a second.

Hamlin has the second seed for the next round with Martin Truex Jr., Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch filing the rest of the top five positions.  The remaining three drivers are Chase Elliott, Joey Logano, and Brad Keselowski.

Kevin Harvick took himself out of title contention when he charged too hard into the first turn with eleven laps left, trying to stay ahead of Elliott and Truex, and went straight into the SAFER barrier.  His departure from the race was good news to Elliott with whom he has had a metal-bending feud going since the Bristol race three weeks ago when Harvick accused Elliott of denying him his first win of the year. Earlier in the race, Harvick had bumped Elliot into the turn eight wall, damaging the rear of the defending NASCAR champion’s car and jeopardizing his chances of advancing in the playoffs.

Elliott’s crew taped the pieces together so he could continue and he wound twelfth.  Harvick’s self-elimination put him 33rd for the day and out of the final eight for the first time since NASCAR went to the current playoff system.

Neither driver showed any contrition about their on-track ongoing dispute, which NASCAR noticed.

NASCAR’s senior vice-president for competition, Scott Miller, told SirusXM radio the Harvick-Elliott snit has to come to an end. “We spoke to them after the thing at Bristol…We don’t need that continuing on and we’ll do what we think is necessary to kind of get that one calmed down.”

Harvick was joined by Christopher Bell, Kurt Busch and Tyler Reddick as drivers no longer contending for the championship.

Unlike stick-and-ball sports, NASCAR playoffs are not a win-or-go home proposition. The four eliminated drivers will still be racing wins in the last four races.

(INDYCAR)—More driver lineups are falling into place for the 2022 INDYCAR season.

Jack Harvey will be in the Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan car next year, replacing Santino Ferrucci.  Ferrucci is believed to be in the running for the third RLL seat that had been occupied by Takuma Sato in 2021.  Sato says his chances of a season-long INDYCAR ride next year are only about 50-50 although he is rumored to be under consideration by Dale Coyne and Rick Ware’s team.  Graham Rahal drives the other team car.

Simon Pagenaud has left Penske and has signed with Meyer-Shank Racing, taking the seat Harvey had held in 2021. He’ll team with Helio Castroneves for a full 2022 schedule.

(FORMULA 1)—Frequent F1 bridesmaid Valtteri Bottas inherited pole position for the Turkish Grand Prix when teammate Lewis Hamilton was penalized ten starting positions for an engine change and refused to give up first place afterwards.  He finished almost fifteen seconds ahead of Max Verstappen in a race dogged by rain.

Verstappen reclaimed the Formula 1 points lead over Hamilton, who finished tenth and thought he would have done much better if he had not been called to the pits for new tires with seven laps to go while running third.  He wound up fifth and dropped out of the points lead to now trail by six.

(photo credits: Bob Priddy)

 

Racing: History at Talladega

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—William Darrell Wallace, known to friends and fans as “Bubba,” has been declared the winner of the rain-shortened race at Talladega, a historic win at a track with great historic significance to the first African-American driver to win a race in NASCAR’s highest division in 57 years.

Wallace, the only black driver in NASCAR Cup competition, drives for a new team owned by basketball star Michael Jordan and fellow driver Denny Hamlin.  The race, postponed from Sunday because of rain, was called after 117 of the scheduled 188 laps Monday because of more rain.  Wallace, who had started 19th, drove his way to the front five laps from the end, passing Kurt Busch to become the 19th driver to lead the race on the track that traditionally features nose-to-tail racing and at least one big crash.  A wreck on the 116th lap, just before the rains came, froze the field with Wallace at the head of the pack.

Restrictor plate races at the big high-banked tracks of Daytona and Talladega are traditionally mad and unpredictable scrambles but Wallace has shown flashes of strength in those races.  He has finished second twice at Daytona although his best previous finish at Talladega was 14th.

He finished ahead of two Ford teammates, Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano.  Bush was squeezed back to fourth, just ahead of Christopher Bell.

The next race, on the Charlotte Roval, will be a cut-down race in which four drivers are eliminated from the chase for the championship.  Kevin Harvick, who led more laps in the Talladega race than any other driver, was shuffled back to eighth when the red flag came out, short-circuiting his hopes of climbing into the top eight in the points chase. He’s nine points out of the playoff field heading to Charlotte.  Christopher Bell’s fifth-place run still leaves him 28 points back.  William Byron, who tangled with two other cars just before the rains hit, is in a must-win situation if he is to advance, as is Alex Bowman, whose chances for a good finished vanished when his car was badly damaged in an early-race wreck with three other competitors.

The victory in the playoff race will not propel Wallace into the next three-race runoff round because he was not among the top sixteen drivers in the points when the regular season ended.

(THE BACKSTORY)—Wallace’s victory was a popular one among his colleagues who showed their support of him by pushing his car to the front of the starting field at Talladega in June, last year, after a noose was reported on the pull-down rope of the door of his garage at the track.  The FBI investigated and determined that the noose had been there since the previous October, at a time when it could not have been predicted Wallace’s team would later use the garage.  Wallace supported the finding.

Wallace was born almost three years after the death of the only other black driver to win a top-level NASCAR race.  His victory comes a little more than 100 years after the birth of Wendell Scott, who passed Richard Petty with 25 laps to go on the half-mile dirt track at Jacksonville Florida in 1964 and went on to win. He was not announced as the winner, however—some say it was because of the racist culture of the time—and the win originally went to Buck Baker, who was two laps behind. NASCAR discovered two hours after the race that Scott had won but he was not officially awarded the win for two more years.  He never received a trophy.  NASCAR presented his family with the trophy he had earned in 2010, seven years before Bubba Wallace ran his first NASCAR Cup race.

Scott ran his last NASCAR race in 1973 but it was injuries he suffered in a crash at Talladega earlier in the year that forced him to retire.  He died in 1990. He never had a sponsor.  His low-budget owner-driver operation nonetheless saw him finish in the top ten in the points standings four times in a thirteen-year, 495-race career.  He finished in the top ten at the end of 147 races.

Bubba Wallace’s team has had full sponsorship all year.  Next year, 23XII Racing (23 was Jordan’s jersey number and XII refers to Hamlin’s car number, 11) will expand to a second car with former NASCAR champion Kurt Busch as driver.

(INDYCAR)—Wheels already are turning for the 2022 INDYCAR season.  The Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Rookie Orientation Program tomorrow will feature two drivers who focused on road courses this year, Jimmie Johnson and Romain Grosjean.

Johnson, who raced on the track’s road course this year, is not unfamiliar with the big oval. He ran eighteen Brickyard 400s in his NASCAR days and won four times.  But this will be his first time on the oval in an open-wheel car.  He has tested an Indycar on an oval however, running some test laps at the Texas Speedway. He has expressed an interest in running the Indianapolis 500 in May but has not committed to the other ovals on the schedule at Texas, Iowa, and Gateway.

Joining him in getting the feel of the big track is Romain Grosjean, the former Formula 1 driver who built a big following in the series this year.  He got a taste of oval racing late in the season at Gateway’s Worldwide Technology Raceway in August.  It will be his first run for his new team-owner, Michael Andretti.  He’s moving over from Dale Coyne racing.

Before drivers are allowed to run on the Indianapolis oval, they have to prove they can handle it.  The program requires them to run ten laps at 205-210 mph, fifteen more at 210=215, and then 15 laps at more than 215.

The big test will come in May.  In this year’s 33-car starting field, Simona DeSilvestro had the slowest four-lap qualifying run at 228.353. Will Power had the slowest qualifying lap at 227,535.

Scott Dixon sat on the pole at 231.685 with a fast lap of 232.757.

The last NASCAR driver to run the 500 was Kurt Busch, who was the rookie of the year with his sixth place finish in 2014. “The Indianapolis 500 will blow you away,” he said after the race. Johnson could become the nineteenth driver to drive in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, which was first run in 1994.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 was off last weekend. It resumes racing in Istanbul with the Turkish Grand Prix. Lewis Hamilton is clinging to a two-point lead over Max Verstappen. \

(Photo credits:  Bob Priddy; Wendell Scott—NASCAR Hall of Fame)

 

Notes from a Quiet Street (Fall Colors edition)

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(Being a compendium of random thoughts that don’t merit full bloggiation.)

Would someone, preferably one of the people Missourians have sent to the U. S. Senate or the U.S. House, enlighten us about why we have a federal debt limit if it can be increased at congressional will?

And, members of our Washington delegation, don’t get all puffy about how you oppose raising it when you and your colleagues previous DID raise it.

Please write a 500-word theme about how you will pay back this debt. If you expect to pass this course, do not give me the tiresome argument that if government reduces its ability to pay for its programs, the public will create more economic growth that will reduce the debt.

There will be no grading on the curve. This is strictly pass/fail.

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When it was announced a few days ago that the nation was averaging 1900 COVID deaths a day for the first time since last March and that 90% of COVID patients in hospitals are unvaccinated, an ugly stroke of capitalist brilliance overwhelmed me.

Monogrammed body bags.  There’s a big constituency for this product—the thousands of people who refuse to get vaccinated.  Take your personal bag to the hospital with you so you can go out in style.

It would be the last status statement, a last chance to be SOMEBODY instead of just some body.

It will be a wonderful memento for your survivors and an inspirational symbol of your stalwart independence.  Could become a family heirloom.

And there would be a good market for used ones.  Run an ad on the internet, or maybe in the newspaper, or offer it on EBay: “Body bag, reasonably priced. Great savings if your initials are _____ (fill in appropriate letters).”

If ya don’t got it, flaunt it.

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The University of Missouri football team, a few days ago, held a charitable event for the athletic department of Southeast Missouri State University. The Tigers gave the Red Hawks $550,000 and all the team from Cape Girardeau had to do was get the snot beaten out of it again at Faurot Field.

Early in the season we see a lot of these games, usually routs.  We’re not sure they should really count on the season’s record of either team but they do—-because they are two college football teams and they do play and somebody keeps score.

Smaller schools are willing to take on these challenges because—in this case $550,000—they get a relative ton of money for athletic programs that come nowhere near having the resources bigger schools have.  If being a punching bag one Saturday afternoon makes sure there are volleyball and soccer and other minor games available for student-athletes in Cape Girardeau, the price is worth it.

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We are sure we are not the only ones to think, or to say when buying a new car, “This is probably the last gas-powered car I’ll ever own.” We’ve said it for the last two cars we’ve bought and the second one is coming up on eight years old. Will there be a third?  Two developments in the past few days make it clear the future is silently roaring (if such thing is possible) our way.

New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul, has signed a new law saying every new passenger car or truck sold in the state must be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.   Medium and heavy-duty trucks have a 2045 goal. This is a huge goal—electric vehicles constituted only two percent of sales last year. The new law is similar to an executive order issued by the governor of California earlier.  Big difference: executive orders are not laws.

That’s plenty of time to develop EVS that don’t need to recharged on round trips to St. Louis or Kansas City.

In fact, one such car is coming over the horizon.

We’ve said that we’ll start to seriously look at an electric vehicle has a 500-mile battery.  There is such a vehicle and the EPA says its range is 520 miles, topping Tesla’s best by more than 100 miles.  The company is called Lucid and it plans to start deliveries of its cars before the end of the year. Lucid is a Silicon Valley-founded company that recently picked Casa Grande, Arizona as the site for its first purpose-built EV factory in North America. It will start by making 10,000 cars a year and plans expansion to produce more than 300,000 a year.

Prices are believed to start at about $77,000. They’re going to have to come down a few tens to be affordable to people such as I am.

Still…….

The future is coming.

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The big inaugural/bicentennial parade in Jefferson City on Saturday, September 18t, was a week premature.   True, Missouri was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821.  But people living out here in central Missouri didn’t know about it until September 25 when the proclamation was published by The Missouri intelligencer¸ in Franklin—Missouri’s first newspaper outside of St. Louis.   Folks in St. Louis celebrated twenty days earlier when Missouri’s first newspaper, The Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, published the proclamation.  No big stories or headlines Just the proclamation.  That’s the primitive reporting style of the day.

 

Racing: Then there were 12, and 3

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing editor

Cutdown weekend winnows the field in both NASCAR and INDYCAR as the seasons head toward their final laps.

(NASCAR)—Kyle Larson won a wild last race of the first playoff round for the NASCAR Cup championship and will lead twelve drivers into the second round.  Four drivers have fallen by the wayside and cannot finish higher than 13th this year regardless of how they run the next seven races.

The long race at one of NASCAR’s shortest tracks is known for generating short tempers, and the crowd saw them on display in the pits after the race when Kevin Harvick (still in his helmet) and Chase Elliott got into an angry discussion of Elliott’s maneuver that Harvick claimed cost him the race.

Harvick, winless this year, challenged Elliott for the lead with 35 laps to go. Contact between the two cars left Elliott with a cut tire.  He lost three laps during a pit stop and came out right behind Harvick, Elliott’s better grip helped him get past Harvick and stay ahead of him by running Harvick’s line while Larson closed, and passed Harvick for the lead with three laps left and beat him to the finish by about two-tenths of a second.

The victory is Larson’s sixth of the year, the most of any driver. Elliott wound up 25th.

Harvick and Elliott had heated words as soon as their cars stopped in the pits. NASCAR officials got between them before things went beyond verbal.  Harvick called Elliott’s blocking move “a temper tantrum” and a “chicken (expletive) move.”  He said he told Elliott he wanted to “rip his freaking head off.”  Elliott said Harvick’s bump of him in passing for the lead is “something he does all the time.  He runs into your left side constantly at other tracks….Did it to me in Darlington a few weeks ago because he was racing me…I don’t care who he is or how long he’s been doing it, I’m going to stand up for myself and my team and we’re going down the road.”

Bristol was the final race in the first three-race round of the playoffs. Both Elliott and Harvick will be in the second round.  But Aric Almirola, Tyler Reddick, Kurt Busch, and Michael McDowell have been eliminated. Reddick was 12th in the race; Almirola 18th,Busch 19th,  and McDowell 24th.

Harvick is seeded twelfth for the second three-race elimination round. Larson retains his lead but Martin Truex Jr., takes over the second seed because he has four wins for the year, ahead of Denny Hamlin, with only one.  Ryan Blaney, Kyle Busch, and Elliott fill slots 4-6.  Then it’s Alex Bowman, William Byron, and Joey Logano, with Brad Keselowski, Christopher Bell and Harvick filling out the rest of the bracket.

The major teams in NASCAR dominate the remaining competitors. Four of the twelve drivers are from Hendrick Motorsports. Four are with Joe Gibbs Racing. Three represent Team Penske. Harvick, who drivers for Stewart-Haas, is the only other driver still in the hunt.

Unlike other major sports, dropping out of playoff contention in NASCAR does not mean leaving the weekly competition.  The twelve remaining playoff competitors still have to compete against two dozen other drivers in every race.

The field will be cut to eight after the next three races, then to four after three more, and those four will be the only drivers in a field of about 38 cars in the year’s final race who can compete for the Cup. Whoever has the best finish in the final race, even if not winning, will be the 2021 NASCAR Cup champion.

Harvick and Elliott, who continued their discussion behind closed doors after the race, will be back on track along with all the other drivers next Sunday at Las Vegas.

(INDYCAR)—-Alex Palou’s second place finish at Laguna Seca has expanded his points lead over challenger Pato O’Ward and Josef Newgarden, the only two drivers with any reasonable hopes of catching him in the series’ last race.

Colton Herta dominated from the pole, giving up the lead to Romain Grosjean for four laps of the 72-lap race, and those during pit stops. Palou chased him for the last part of the race but came up almost two seconds short.  It’s Herta’s second win at Laguna Seca, his fifth in his three-year INDYCAR career, one more than his father, Bryan, accumulated in thirteen years on the circuit.  His father, Bryan, is now his race manager.

Palou now leads O’Ward by 35 points and two-time champion Josef Newgarden by 48 heading into next weekend’s finale on the streets of Long Beach.  He will clinch his first championship if he finishes 11th or better.

The contest for INDYCAR Rookie of the year between Grosjean and Scott McLaughlin remains tight with only twenty points separating the two. Grosjean, who started 13th, ran a scintillating last segment of the race, cutting his separation from Herta by a second or more (sometimes two), lap after lap.  He was down ten seconds with nine laps to go but he could get no closer than 3.7-seconds when Herta took the checkered flag.

This will be the sixteenth straight year the INDYCAR championship will be decided at the season’s last race.  INDYCAR does not have a playoff system, as NASCAR does.

(SCHEDULES)—Missourians who like big-time auto racing will have no races in the state next year, as usual, but will have plenty of races within day-trip distance (depending on where they live, of course).  INDYCAR’s 2022 schedule, just announced, has two races at the Indianapolis Speedway in May including the 500, a double-header return to Iowa June 23-24, and at Nashville and Gateway (World Wide Technology Raceway) across the river from St. Louis in August.

NASCAR will run at the Kansas Speedway, across the line from Kansas City, on May 15 and September 11, and will have its first Cup race ever at Gateway on June 5.  Nashville comes up on June 26. The second race on the Indianapolis Speedway Road Course will be July 31.

By the way—-

Before promoters built the Kansas Speedway, an effort was made to gain state support for a major track near Kansas City International Airport, the Missouri legislature thought the idea wasn’t worth state financial incentives and passed.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 returns for the Grand Prix of Russia at the Sochi circuit next Sunday, the first race since the Monza dustup between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.  Verstappen has been slapped with a three-place grid penalty for the start of the race.

(Photo credits: NASCAR/Jared C. Tilton-Getty Images,  and Bob Priddy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Racing— Truex locks in; Palou regains lead; A halo prevents a halo

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet contributing editor

(NASCAR)—Martin Truex Jr., has become the second driver to lock in a position for the second round of NASCAR’s playoffs by Beating last week’s winner, Denny Hamlin, to the finish line at Richmond.  He let a 1-2-3 finish for Joe Gibbs racing.  Christopher Bell was third.

Truex had to come back from a penalty on the race start when he Hamlin, the pole-sitter, to the start line.  NASCAR ordered him to the back of the 37-car field for a restart.  He got to the lead on the 132nd of the race’s 400 laps and led the last fifty.  Hamlin led almost half of the laps but couldn’t catch Truex at the end. Larson, who started the race from the back because of pre-race inspection failures, raced past Truex for his first lead on the 133rd lap but finished sixth.  The finish gave him enough points to make him the third driver assured of a spot in the round of 12 that will go forward for the championship after next Sunday’s night race at Bristol.

(INDYCAR)—Alex Palou came from 16th place early in the Grand Prix of Portland to get his third win of the season and vault him back into the points lead with just two races left in the INDYCAR season.  He finished 1.3 seconds up on alexander Rossi with teammate and defending series champion Scott Dixon getting the last podium slot.

The win vaults Palou past Pato O’Ward, who led early but faded to 14th at the end.  A handful of drivers are still given a chance to win the championship—Palou, O’Ward, two-time champion Josef Newgarden, who is 34 points back. Dixon, in fourth, trails by 49 and Marcus Ericsson has a distant hope from 75 points behind.

A total of 108 points are available in the concluding two INDYCAR races: Laguna Seca next weekend and the finale on the streets of Long Beach on the 26th.

(FORMULA 1)—The world’s major open-wheel racing series have created cockpit safety systems designed to protect drivers from flying debris or in other cars landing on top of other cars.

INDYCAR’s system is enclosed except for the top for driver access.  Formula One has a similar system but it does not include a windshield.  It’s called a “halo” in F1.  And seven-time F1 champion  Lewis Hamilton is convinced he isn’t wearing a halo today because his car had one for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

Hamilton and Max Verstappen, who have an intense competition for this year’s championship going, tangled in the first chicane on the race’s 26th lap, with Verstappen trying to pass on the outside. His car rode over the track curb, pitching it onto the top of Hamilton’s car, the right rear wheel of Verstappen’s car rolling over the halo protecting Hamilton. The tire slightly penetrated the top of the halo.

Hamilton said in the paddock after the race that he was reminded of his own mortality and the risks he takes:  “It’s a big shock. It’s only when you experience something like that that you  look at life and realize how fragile we are.” He is convinced the halo saved his life.  There was no sign of concussion but he will see a specialist after complaining that his neck was sore.  “

“Honestly, I feel very fortunate today,” he continued. “Thank God for the halo, that ultimately, I think, saved me, and saved my neck… I don’t think I’ve ever been hit on the head by a car before and it’s quite a shock for me, because I don’t know if you’ve seen the image but my head really is quite far forward. And I’ve been racing a long, long time, so I’m so, so grateful that I’m still here.”

F1 officials consider Verstappen’s actions the main cause of the crash and have announced a three-grid place drop at the next race, and the loss of two standings points. The two drivers have had other incidents this year as they have fought for the top spot in the series.

Neither driver scored any points in the race, leaving Verstappen five points ahead of Hamilton, with eight races left on the schedule.

The winner of the race was McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo, his first victory on the circuit in three years and McLaren’s first GP victory since Jenson Button won at Brazil in 2012. Making the event even sweeter for McLaren was Lando Norris’ second-place finish.  Third went to Valtteri Bottas, Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate.

(Photo credits: Truex: NASCAR/Sean Gardner/Getty Images; Palou and Pagenaud and Rossi at Gateway 2019: Bob Priddy; Verstappen-Hamilton crash: Formula 1)

A Good Time for a First Win; And a Glimpse at INDYCAR’s Future

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contribution Editor

(NASCAR)—Win when it really counts.

Denny Hamlin, winless this year, picks up his first victory in the first of NASCAR’s ten playoff races and becomes the first driver to lock in a place in the next round.  Hamlin held off a banzai charge off the last turn by pre-race favorite Kyle Larson to win the Southern 500 at Darlington.

For most of the event, it was a two-man race between the drivers who finished 1-2 in regular season points.  They combined to lead 302 of the race’s 367 laps.  Larson, who challenged Hamlin for most of the last stage of the race launched an all-out run for the lead on the last turn, scraping the wall as he tried to get outside of Hamlin, finished two-tenths of a second short of his sixth win of the year.  Ross Chastain was third, his best finish of the year. Martin Truex Jr., and Kevin Harvick rounded out the top five.

Hamlin, who finished in the top five in half of this year’s races—including four thirds and a second—automatically qualifies for the round of 12 that will go on for the championship after the next two races.  Larson still leads in points, however, thanks to bonus points he piled up for victories, stage wins, and being the top points driver after the regular season.

Harvick and Tyler Reddick remain the only playoff drivers without a checkered flag this year.

The next playoff race will be at Richmond next Saturday night.

(INDYCAR)—INDYCAR resumes racing next Sunday afternoon on the road circuit at Portland, the first of the three races that will close out its season.  The last three races promise to be a shootout between Pato O’Ward, Alex Palou, and Josef Newgarden.  O’Ward took over the points lead from Palou three weeks ago at Worldwide Technology Raceway across the river from St. Louis and Newgarden put himself in the championship picture by winning the race there.  The three are separated by 22 points.

Six-time champion Scott Dixon is lurking in fourth, only 43 back.

This has been a year of emergence for INDYCAR’s young drivers as the series looks at changes coming in the next couple of years.

We spent some time with INDYCAR President Jay Frye after the INDYCAR/NASCAR tripleheader at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway last month, talking about this year, next year, and the new engines coming in 2022—–and what might or might not be in the more distant future.

Frye is a Mizzou graduate (marketing/education), a former Tiger football player (tight end/offensive tackle)and Rock Island Illinois native who says he learned to drive by driving a truck for the family-owned garbage trucking company. Before joining INDYCAR, Frye was with NASCAR, where he was named by ESPN the 2008 NASCAR Executive of the Year.

We started by discussing the weekend tripleheader of two NASCAR races and an INDYCAR race on the IMS road course

AUDIO:frye edited 2021 indy

Donald Davidson was the Speedway historian for more than 50 years before his retirement last year.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen has become the first Dutch driver in the 71-year history of F1 to win the Dutch Grand Prix.

His seventeenth career victory breaks a record he had shared with British great Sterling Moss for the driver with the most victories, but no F1 championship. That, however, could change this year.

Verstappen picked up his seventh win of the year, finishing twenty seconds ahead of Lewis Hamilton and taking the points lead from the seven-time champion.  Verstappen is now up by three.  He barely beat Hamilton for the pole but Hamilton had nothing for him during the race.

Hamilton teammate Valterri Bottas was third and afterwards announced that he was going to be the number one driver for Alfa Romeo next year.  Taking his place on the Mercedes roster will be George Russell, who has driven this year for the Williams team, which uses Mercedes engines. His success in F1 feeder series championships has positioned him to take the place of Bottas, who has been second-banana to Hamilton, who has described him as the best teammate he’s ever had.

 

 

Blaney wins, Reddick’s in, and The most ridiculous race ever

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

Before we recap NASCAR’s final race of the regular season and list the ten drivers who have made the playoffs we have to tell you about a Formula One race that lasted less than a lap.

The Belgian Grand Prix never saw a green flag.  No driver earned points for fastest lap because every lap was run behind the pace car, or as they call it in F1, the safety car.  A relentless downpour was the culprit, but so was the series’ policy of running a race on the day it was scheduled to be run.

Even if it never was a race.  Even if the finishing positions were the starting positions.

Here’s how it all came down:

First, torrential rain came down.  Then the scheduled start time came down.  No go. After a           three-hour wait, the safety car led the field out of the pits.  The competitors did the ceremonial formation lap but did not halt for the usual standing start. Instead, they kept circulating for two more laps and returned to the pits, never to turn go out again.

The official time of the race was three minutes, 27.01 seconds.

Formula 1 rules say a race is official after completion of just two laps.  The rules say the final finishing order is determined by positions on the lap before the suspension of the race.  Thus, the Grand Prix of Belgium, 2021, goes into the history books as lasting one lap, with pole-sitter Max Verstappen the winner with George Russell, who qualified second giving the Williams team its first podium finish since 2017, and giving defending F1 champion Lewis Hamilton third, his starting position.

Points are usually awarded to the driver who achieves the fastest lap.  There was no such lap in this, uh, event.

Racefans.net says the race actually lasted less than one lap because there is a 124-meter offset between the start line and the finish line. Therefore, says the site, the race did not lost 7.004 kilometers, the length of one lap, but only 6.88 kilometers.

All three of the podium drivers apologized to fans who waited throughout the rain but only got to see an almost-race that has been described with various derogatory words in the European media.

Because the race fell 32 laps short of reaching 76% of its distance, the points were reduced by half.  Verstappen, by “finishing first” received 12.5 points.  Hamilton’s third was worth 7.5 points.  He now leads Verstappen in the standings by three.

Hamilton called the event a “farce” said he hopes the fans get their money back.  There’s been no comment from F1.

However, Motorsport.com is reporting that Formula One CEO Stefano Domenicali “is eager for discussions with the sports stakeholders,” and F1 Race Director agrees. “We’ll look at a whole lot of things that we can all look at, to see what everyone wants,” he says.

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Now, to a race that was a race.

(NASCAR)—The last race of NASCAR’s regular season was a must-win situation for most of te field, a contest between teammates for the last playoff spot, and a second straight win for Ryan Blaney.  The race went an extra five laps because a scramble for positions with thirteen laps to go saw eight cars get tangled up, leading to a stoppage of the race.  Eleven cars got together in the first overtime attempt for a finish and nine cars got wadded behind Blaney on the last lap.  The race finished under the yellow flag with Chris Buescher trailing Blaney to the finish.  However, Buescher’s car failed a post-race inspection and was disqualified, leaving him last in the final standings and Bubba Wallace second.

The last playoff spot had been in contention between Childress Racing teammates Tyler Reddick and Austin Dillon. Dillon was caught up in the crash on the last lap.  Reddick, whose car was damaged in the wreck 13 laps from the end, was able to keep going after some quick repairs in the pits, and finished fifth.

Reddick was 16th in the standings after the first 12 races with only one top-ten finish. He had climbed to 11th going into the Daytona races, posting nine top tens in the last fourteen races. His fifth on Saturday night is his best finish of the year.

Blaney heads into the playoffs with two straight wins, three for the year, and second-seeded behind regular-season points champion Kyle Larson.

The first of ten playoff races will be at Darlington next Sunday.  The drivers who will run for the championship are Larson, Blaney, Martin Truex, Jr., Kyle Busch, defending champion Chase Elliott, Alex Bowman, Denny Hamlin, William Byron, Joey Logano, Brad Keselowski, Kurt Busch, Christopher Bell, Michael McDowell, Aric Almirola, Reddick, and Kevin Harvick.  Only Hamlin, Reddick, and Harvick have yet to win this year.

(Photo Credits: Formula 1, Bob Priddy)