RACE-CHANGING DIFFERENCE
The 2.3-mile, nine-turn Homestead-Miami Speedway road course finally "lost" the driver-right gravel trap formerly located between the road course's first and second infield turns.
Designed to cushion and ensnare cars which failed to safely negotiate a transition from the track's highest-speed section to its slowest, the trap successfully filled its purpose but needlessly often caused numerous cautions thrown only to free trapped cars.
Usually having suffered no damage other than a driver's bruised ego, cars would afterward be dragged from the pit in an excruciatingly slow process that did little more than spread gravel where it shouldn't be - causing still further delay of green-flag racing.
Demonstrated more than once during Saturday's Grand Prix of Miami, the now grass-covered area serves to slow individual wayward cars; not every car in that race.
Kudos go to the HMS staff for ridding the track of an unnecessary detriment.
ROGER'S BIG LESSON
"The one thing I learned is that they (Rolex Series officials) should've left the rules alone at the beginning of the (2009) season because, basically, they detuned us," Roger Penske said.
ROGER'S NEXT BIGGEST LESSON?
No. 12 Verizon Wireless Porsche-Riley drivers Romain Dumas and Timo Bernhard didn't seem to get their individual or collective heads around a Rolex Series restart rule that demands competitors retain their respective caution-flag position until having actually taken the green flag at a race track's start/finish line.
Such happened twice to Dumas earlier in the year (Virginia International Raceway and Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca) when the No. 12 Verizon Wireless Porsche-Riley was in a contending position. It happened again - this time with Bernhard at the wheel in seventh place - with about 20-min. remaining and with the Penske Racing team in the midst of another strong run.
Learning of the third-such 2009 infraction, Bernhard pled his case as best as possible over the radio, saying he had nowhere to go after the cars in front failed to accelerate quickly enough.
The moment provided a poetic punctuation mark to the end of a 2009 season that many inside and outside of the series thought was Penske's for the taking.
Winning a championship being another matter, still this writer would've thought someone fit for funny farm admission had an "oh-for" prediction been rendered at season's start.
RACE TIMIING
Early in the race, while the rest of the field took the race's first green-flag restart, Memo Rojas was in a slow, simultaneous drive down pit road in his Chip Ganassi Racing w/Felix Sabates No. 01 TELMEX Lexus-Riley.
Rojas had started the Telmex car in seventh spot and pretty well hung out there for the race's first 30-minutes but team director Tim Keene called the No. 01 Telmex car into the pits for service and driver change to Scott Pruett shortly after the race's first caution flag waved - returning the Telmex car to the field's rear with the race leaders lurking but two corners behind.
At the moment Keene looked to many as though he'd altogether blown - a la Montreal - the final race's pit strategy.
The World According to Keene was mostly righted about 45-minutes later with the race's third yellow (of six, total) when Pruett (and superior pit work) put the Telmex car back on the track in front of the No. 99 - which had to absolutely, positively be beaten for the Telmex team to even possibly retain the DP driving championship.
Yet, the defending champs were fighting an uphill battle.
"We had to shake things up; do what others weren't doing," Keene said. "We had to think outside of the box."
While the Telmex guys yielded the championship trophy to the team from which it was wrested in 2008, it showed spunk by managing to climb another ladder-rung higher than where it had been in the standings before the HMS race, finishing second in DP driver points.
CAT ON A SUN(Trust)-HOT TIN ROOF
Let us first establish the premise that Wayne Taylor really gets wound up. Such is not to convey a good or bad connotation - after all, Taylor for decades has clearly shown an ability to race and win. But a launched, unsheathed claws-flailing kitty ain't got a thing on Taylor.
Opening driver Brian Frisselle put the No 10 SunTrust Ford-Dallara on the outside pole with a 1:13.163 at 113.172 mph run, next to pole-winner Jon Fogarty and his No. 99 Gainsco/Bob Stallings Racing Pontiac-Riley.
The Grand Prix of Miami's first caution flag likewise figured prominently for Daytona Prototype championship contender SunTrust when the team pulled qualifier and race-starter Frisselle short of a necessary 30-minute, points-scoring mark in favor of seasoned veteran Max Angelelli.
"The intent is to put him back in the car but we've got to think of the championship," Taylor said soon afterward. "The way we were losing time it seems like the right thing to do. We've got to win this race."
In what seemed more orchestrated than not, Frisselle would later say that he'd gladly fall on his sword - meaning he wouldn't mind not winning a driving crown - if the team came out the better as a result. Man, there isn't a driver in the world worth his salt who doesn't think he's the more capable; period.
Well, the team's Pirelli tires still faded faster than those of its competitors, suggesting the SunTrust team's Dallara or team engineering was more the problem than the P-Zero tires that most in the Rolex Series paddock nonetheless love to hate for exactly the same reason.
"I'm a little disgusted with, um, the materials," Taylor said without elaboration but hinting such as being the principal reason behind Frisselle's earlier driving-job relief.
Like nemesis Telmex, the SunTrust team had to try all it could to win the championship for it, too, had to more or less win the race to claim the overall crown. But, like the Telmex team, it came up short.
On the Grand-Am Weekly radio show earlier in the week, Angelelli had said there was no way he was taking a chance on a post-race, car-drive up Florida's Turnpike from Homestead to Orlando with Taylor.
"I've got a flight booked to Orlando," Angelelli said, "There's no way I'm spending four hours in a car with Wayne, especially if we don't win the championship."
With 28-min. remaining in the race, Angelelli brought the No. 10 car down pit road so that Frisselle could get back in the seat, for sure dropping the pair one place, to third, in the championship standings.
WONDERING ABOUT THINGS YELLOW
Did race director Mark Raffauf give in and finally make racing all about manipulating the show?
Rewind to the 2006 Mexico City race where NASCAR chairman Brian France appeared. A friend of Chip Ganassi and TELMEX owner Carlos Slim Domit, France was cheering for "his" team while in the No. 01's pit box.
As that race droned on - as races often do at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez - France perceived a bunching of the field as the best means by which the Telmex car might contend for the win and thus repeatedly shouted for a yellow flag. Now, before panties get all wadded and conspiracy theorists start running mouths before brains are engaged, like football coaches yelling for the "next" penalty, there ain't a race team owner or fan alive who hasn't yelled, prayed or pined for something that otherwise didn't happen.
Still, while some in the vicinity perceived France's shouts as an order, he later insisted it was merely his getting wrapped up in the moment, no less than have many fans.
Regardless, Raffauf didn't call for a yellow and, in fact, the race continued green from that point until its conclusion.
Back in "real time," red of face and flushed from the heat caused by a GAINSCO/GNC cockpit he'd just surrendered to co-driver Alex Gurney, Jon Fogarty wondered aloud if perhaps the Miami Grand Prix's earliest yellow flags had been artificially induced.
"They keep falling at opportune times for our competition; first at Utah, then here and I'm starting to wonder," Fogarty said as he left the listener to fill in the blanks on just what the driver actually wondered.
Later, a couple of inopportune (for the competition) yellows flew just as the GAINSCO/GNC Pontiac engine too rapidly started nearing the end of its life (literally and figuratively, huh?) in the race's dwindling laps.
"We're not sure why but the engine started going soft there at the end," team-owner Bob Stallings later said.
"It's been pretty tough fight this year and the competition gets tougher each successive season, so I expect next year it to be even harder in the championship fight - but I want a third."
So it is said; so shall it be done?
FROM LAST TO THIRD
Speaking of tough battles, Oswaldo Negri was last in the Daytona Prototype field early in his stint but worked his No. 60 Michael Shank Racing Ford-Riley to a third-place podium finish by race end, helping win the Jim Trueman Sportsman award for co-driver and patron Mark Patterson.
Contrasting Negri's quiet, calm demeanor outside of a race car with that of the Brazilian's mentality while within one, Patterson laughingly said of Negri, "He's the meanest, most evil religious guy you'll ever meet in your life."
DRINKIN' MATE GOES DOWN GOOD
"Better to be lucky than good," driver Kelly Collins often has said.
But when you get lucky and are good like Collins and co-driver Paul Edwards, good things then can happen.
Such finally did so Saturday for the Leighton Reese-owned No. 07 Drinkin' Mate Pontiac XP.R team at Homestead-Miami Speedway when the 2008 championship-winning team won its first Acxiom GT race of the season in what may be the former factory sponsored team's swan-song event.
It didn't come easily, to be sure.
At the wheel for the first part of the race, Collins went a lap down to the field when a flat-tire fix was necessitated shortly after a brush with the No. 69 FXDD Mazda RX8 of Jeff Segal.
On the incident, Collins angrily said, "He was a lap down. He didn't get it back on the lead lap following the restart and wasn't fighting for position. He was blocking me for two laps."
WILL BARBER MOTORSPORTS PARK'S RECORD CONTINUE?
Just when you get into a dependable routine, something comes along and changes it.
Life does those things, you know.
As has happened for five seasons, the winner of the Barber Motorsports Park Rolex Series race - race eight of the 2009 12-race schedule - went on to win the series' championship.
In July, Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney won the 2009 BMP race and, consequently, the Daytona Prototype drivers' championship Saturday.
For 2010, though, the Birmingham, Alabama race has been moved to April - the season's third race.
TAKING THE GT CROWN, FINALLY
"For me it was really huge," Dirk Werner, driver of the No. 87 Farnbacher Loles Porsche, said of his and co-driver Lehman Keen's final drive to the Acxiom GT driving championship - one that could've been "wrapped" at Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele, Utah three weeks ago if not for Werner's misplaced, late-race passing attempt that has since been replayed way too many times.
Previously, one would expect someone as talented as Werner to contend in a championship hunt. Now, one expects the same of Keen, who this season consistently exhibited considerable skill at the wheel.
The pair will switch to a BMW for the 2010 Rolex Series' Acxiom GT season and, should the car be up to snuff, Keen and Werner will be a tough team to beat in 2010. Yet, one expected the same of both Bill Auberlen and Joey Hand's respective BMW teams over in that other series, too.
AN APPROPRIATE EXCLAMATION POINT ON THE WEEKEND
Just as the initial green flag started waving for the start of Saturday's Miami Grand Prix, "An indiscretion with the law," is how SPEEDtv's Leigh Diffey termed J.C. France's absence from Brumos Racing's No. 59 Porsche Riley.
When the Australian quickly went to describing the race action moments later, complaints started flowing and reached a similar second crescendo at race end after little more was said on the subject of J.C France's arrest for various reasons - one involving possession of cocaine - early Thursday in Daytona Beach.
"Why did Speed try to hide it?" said one person watching the race on television, expressing a theme echoed by another viewer, also critical of the broadcast team, "for failing" to go into greater depth.
The main reason would be that SPEEDtv's race-day job isn't to cover something already well covered. No further breaking news on the subject had occurred and thus relegated the story to old news.
In short: Diffey and crew dealt with that which was occurring, not that which had already been clearly documented.
The two-car Brumos Racing team, the face of which will likely change in many ways come 2010, won the 2009 season's first race at Daytona and coasted - after a darn hard fight to get there - to the No. 1 podium at the 2009 finale in Homestead.
Jaoa Barbosa and Hurley Haywood - the latter teaming with J.C. France in 2003 to score the Daytona Prototype class' first overall victory here - captured the win fair and square despite the team's numerous distractions.
Meanwhile, it's a bummer that too many human beings can take such obvious delight at the distress of another.
Later,
DC
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