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Off-Season Thoughts: The winter doldrums

Let me start by being the 48,969th IndyCar Series fan to say this statement.

Having a six-month offseason sucks. Profoundly.

Especially when you live in Boston like I do. Don’t get me wrong, I love being here. It’s a great city with decent people and for all of its drawbacks (non-stop Pats coverage in the papers…Me and my dad’s side are Cowboys fans), there’s always something to like about the Hub — good bars, unique neighborhoods…Aerosmith.

But there’s one problem I’ve had to deal with for the past four years: Boston + winter = cold. And while we’ve finally melted all of the snow from our recent winter storms, it remains quite frigid and icy around here. I like snow. I hate ice. It just makes me long for Florida after a while.

As a human being, I thank God for Florida for many reasons, particularly for their oranges (yum). As a race fan, I thank God for Florida on two counts: The Daytona 500 and the IndyCar Series’ season opener, the Miami Indy 300. But while I only have to wait a month or so for the former — and only a few more hours for NASCAR testing proper — I have to wait 82 more days for the latter. That’s a depressing thought to me, especially since we’re in the dead zone of IndyCar’s winter doldrums.

The dead zone usually comes around the New Year’s holiday and it is when news is at its hardest to come by. There’s a few scraps lying around: Iowa Speedway and Kentucky Speedway have started their ‘08 ticket sales, former Honda Racing leader Robert Clarke is officially on his way out, and Scott Dixon’s been nominated for a big award in his home country of New Zealand. But nothing really big.

And just when it looked like the Silly Season might have provided a huge story with the possible defection of Champ Car star Paul Tracy to IndyCar, the situation has apparently been resolved with him returning to the open-wheel road racing series.

For those of you who hadn’t been paying attention, here’s the skinny. After Tracy signed a five-year deal with longtime home Forsythe Racing this year, team and series co-owner Gerry Forsythe had asked the Canadian star to renegotiate his contract and take a pay cut. Keep in mind that Tracy, a Champ Car loyalist for many years, signed this deal partly to pledge allegiance to CC by cutting out his past NASCAR dalliances.

The tactics from Forsythe had angered Tracy so much so that outside forces — namely, the Canadian races on the Champ Car schedule — were feeling it. Not only that, it had ripple effects on the Indy Racing League. When Panther Racing answered in the affirmative in query to a fan’s question about whether they’d be interested in having PT as their driver, it ended up setting off some rumbles.

Never mind the fact that the probability of Tracy joining the Indy Racing League was only slightly better than a snowball’s chance in hell — especially after the alleged robbery of his “win” in the 2002 Indianapolis 500.

I always believed that Tracy would work out his problems with Champ Car and Forsythe. The whole “Tracy to the IRL” thing was always a long-shot and to be honest, I’m glad it’s over. While he would have been a great villain for IndyCar, how much lasting effect would he, a driver pushing 40, have on the series?

With him out of the picture, Tomas Scheckter is the big fish now in Silly Season ‘08. Apparently, Vision Racing appears set to downsize to two cars and it looks like Ed Carpenter and A.J. Foyt IV are the probable drivers. And with the Big Three (Penske, Andretti-Green and Ganassi) all set on driver lineups, the South African doesn’t have a lot of choices left beyond the second car for Panther Racing and the second car at Dreyer and Reinbold.

Not to mention that P.J. Chesson looks like he has the inside line on the former, despite a grand total of five IndyCar Series career starts to his credit. It’d be a crying shame if Scheckter found himself out in the cold. I’ve said it before to readers: The series would be duller without him, the resident “Mister Excitement.”

But it certainly wouldn’t be as dull as my blogging life right now.  With Helio Castroneves’ exploits in ‘Dancing with the Stars’ now a memory, the Scheckter episode appears to be the only story of some importance going on right now in the series.

Everything else is still frozen. Like a Boston winter.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.