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Teru teru bozu need to try harder at Motegi

What the hell are “teru teru bozu,” you say? According to Rich Freeman, the Daily Yomiuri’s man at Twin Ring Motegi, they are Japanese good luck symbols that specialize in keeping the rain away. Looking at this picture off Wikipedia, they’re apparently supposed to hang from something and that they can look like cute little ghosts.

I haven’t seen any pictures of teru teru bozu hanging at Twin Ring Motegi. Maybe that’s because they’re aren’t any around there. Maybe they should try to enlist the youngsters at the track to start making them in bulk; give ‘em free Hideki Mutoh gear in return and not just one of those driver flags either. I say this because one look at TRM’s web camera shows that the 1.5-mile oval is looking pretty soaked right now.

Final practice is set to begin in about an hour-and-a-half at Motegi, where it’s almost 9 a.m. on Friday morning right now. Looks like the drivers were right in focusing on race set-up yesterday instead of qualifying. We still have to see what tonight brings, but just in case we don’t have quals, the cars will line up for the race based on drivers’ points with Helio Castroneves and Scott Dixon on the front row.

In the meantime, let’s hope the teru teru bozu can do something about this.

UPDATE (9:54 p.m. ET/Friday 10:54 a.m. JT): Practice and qualifying have been canceled as the rain comes down hard at Twin Ring Motegi. Only a tour bus was going around the track when I last looked at IndyCar.com’s live video feed a few minutes ago.

The teru teru bozu have failed. And according to the Japanese nursery rhyme, we must cut their heads off. I’ve got scissors, now, to find a doll…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6:54 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.