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Motegi/Long Beach: A price that must be paid

By Christopher Estrada | April 17th, 2008

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This weekend serves as the last barrier before American open-wheel racing is truly 100-percent unified.

With the late coming of unification in February, the races at Twin Ring Motegi and the streets of Long Beach, Calif. ended up clashing together on the same date. And with neither one able to move their dates, we are faced with this cross-ocean double-header: the IndyCar Series veterans are in Japan, while the new IndyCar drivers are finishing their Champ Car careers in Southern California.

Please keep in mind that this problem could have been averted had Champ Car owners not waited until the last minute to accept Tony George’s unification plans, which were first proposed in the fall of 2007. That being said, Kevin Kalkhoven didn’t think it was serious, because it wasn’t in writing at the time. In any case, both sides had a lot to do with having precious time squandered and now, we have this. Thankfully, as Pete Pistone of CBSSportsline.com writes, it’s just a temporary glitch; a price that must be paid in order for open-wheel to get back on the road to redemption.

Now that my little rant is over, we’ve got a busy night ahead at the Twin Ring with final practice and qualifying for the Indy Japan 300. IndyCar.com will be streaming a live video feed beginning at 9:30 p.m. ET, in addition to Live Timing and Scoring.

There’s still a good chunk of time before that happens, so maybe you can check out my Motegi preview beforehand? Yes, that was a plug. Yes, it was shameless. No, I don’t care.

(Amended after FormulaFox made a big find. I had a hunch that Kalkhoven had said something about the deal not being in writing, but it only came after I had written this. I also had an outside engagement right after this post, so I wrote it on the fly without running through it afterwards. Thanks to FF for the catch!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 2:44 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.