This will be another abbreviated version this week, as we have our first race outing to get ready for with the VARAC race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park opening the season.

World Superbike at Misano

Jonathan Rea has looked pretty dominant in the opening rounds of the 2021 World Superbike Championship, but at Misano he looked beatable, taking a pair of 3^rd place finishes, while local hero Michael Ruben Rinaldi on his Ducati took the win in race 1, followed by a 2^nd place in race 2. That moved Rinaldi up to 5^th in the championship points. Meanwhile, Toprak Razgatlioglu did the opposite of Rinaldi by taking 2^nd in race 1 and winning race 2. Those results moved Razgatlioglu up to 2^nd in the points, just 20 points behind Rea.

NASCAR

All 3 series were in action at Texas for the All-Star race, and I will admit, this is not my favorite event, or my favorite track. I didn't catch much of the Xfinity race, as the red flags caused the Indy Car race to go long, and flipping back and forth wasn't doing much, so I ended up on the Indy Car race, waiting out the red flags. There was another top 20 for Alex Labbe, so another decent finish.

Kyle Larson is proving to be the most dominant driver this season, taking the All-Star win, his third in a row, and the fifth in a row for Hendrick.

IMSA

It was a great day for Roman DeAngelis and the Heart of Racing Aston Martin team in the GTD class. The team originally finished second, but was moved to first after the winning Audi was penalized for a pit lane violation. IMSA for some reason has yet to update the GTD point standings, but the Heart of Racing Team went into Detroit in second place, trailing the Bill Auberlen/Robby Foley BMW by 7 points, and with the new IMSA scoring system, there is 385 points on offer between the race and qualifying. With the BMW qualifying in fourth, one place behind the Aston Martin, and finishing eighth in the race, if my math is correct then De Angelis and team mate Ross Gunn should leave Detroit with a 115 point lead over the BMW. On a quick glance of the finishing orders, I'm also assuming that the BMW stays in second place, but I'm not doing all the GTD math to figure it out. Hopefully IMSA will update the points at some point in the near future.

Mikael Grenier was the only other Canadian running at the finish in the SunEnergy 1 Racing Mercedes coming home in seventh.

It was a tough day for the other two Canadians in the race, Jeff Kingsley in the Compass Racing McLaren and Daniel Morad in the Alegra Motorsports Mercedes, were both out early, due to contact, finishing ninth and tenth respectively.

The two corvettes showed up for what was really an exhibition run on home soil, since there were no other GTLM cars in the field. The class originally wasn't scheduled to race this weekend, they were supposed to be in France for Le Mans, but with that race put off until later in the summer, IMSA decided to extend the invitation to all GTLM cars, and only Corvette took them up on it. For the record, the #4 Corvette of Tommy Milner and Nick Tandy took the class win over the #3 of Antonia Garcia and Jordan Taylor.

Overall, the Ganassi Racing Cadillac DPi took the win, with Kevin Magnussen scoring his first win in almost a decade, along with team mate Renger van der Zande. Felipe Nasr & Pipo Derani took second in another Cadillac, with Ricky Taylor & Filipe Albuquerque rounding out the podium in the #10 Acura.

Indy Car Double Header At Detroit

First, we'll start off with the Indy Lights races which, being televised on RevTV we were actually able to see. It was a tough weekend for Devlin DeFrancesco, crashing early in the first qualifying put him on the back foot on a track he's never raced at. The weekend was mostly damage control, managing to make up places early in both races, finishing seventh in the opening race and fifth in the second race on Sunday. Currently DeFrancesco sits in fifth place, with 130 points, 61 behind championship leader Linus Lundqvist. Next up for the Lights is Road America.

As always, Indy Lights coverage will be available on REV TV with race one on Saturday at 4:05pm and race two Sunday at 9:50am

And now for Indy Car...

Race one on Saturday started out very disappointingly, with NBC cutting to the race late because of overtime in the field lacrosse game, meaning we missed the start.

The race itself wasn't bad for a street race, with Marcus Ericsson taking his first win, after heart break for Will Power, leading the race, and seemingly in control with 5 laps to go, when the red flag came out. Power's car was unable to restart, after we heard radio from Power begging for cooling fans brought to his car.

According to an interview with Power after the race (which we didn't get to see, so thank you Twitter...) Indy Car said they couldn't use any cooling fans until all cars were stopped in pit lane. As it turns out, the cooling fans, or lack there of, weren't the problem. Penske released a statement today saying there was a shut down/start up issue with the car that put the ECU into “boot mode” and needed a Chevy tech to plug into the engine in to reboot the start up process, so in the end, the heat and fans played no part in the failure to re-start. A good article from Racer.com here give an explanation.

As for race 2, I don't know, and I don't care anything about it. First, NBC decided tennis was more important that Indy Car, so the race got shunted from the regular NBC stations to CNBC, which we don't get here in Canada, at least not the version of CNBC that carried the race. I no longer get CNBC, but did check either last year or the year before (I've lost all sense of time since “retirement” and the lockdowns) when the race was moved to CNBC and the version we got was not carrying the race, so if this has changed, someone can let me know.

Then of course, Rogers had to outdo themselves by moving the race to Sportsnet World, without any notice. When I put the Tune-In Alerts together on Friday, it was listed as being on Sportsnet 360 at noon, but when I re-checked the guide at noon on Sunday, the programming had been changed. And of course, Sportsnet had a hockey game on all 4 channels from 1987 for the majority of the race, and more wrestling on SN360.

Sporstnet is a joke right now, and if Indy Car doesn't sort this situation out with the next contract, then Indy Car may be lost in Canada, and, sadly, the Honda Indy Toronto maybe lost along with it. I'm not going into much more here, I will have a rant about the whole Sportsnet situation later this week.

Pirelli Reports On Tire Failures

Pirelli has released the results of their investigation into the tire failures of Red Bull Racing and Aston Martin, and the Twitter army of sim racers won't be happy. In a strangely worded release, Pirelli said, essentially, there was an inner sidewall failure of the tires that was not a result of a manufacturing defect. Red Bull Racing promptly released a statement that said “We did everything Pirelli told us to”

The best article I've read on this so far is from RaceFans and you should check it out here. Read between the lines, and you will see exactly what Pirelli thinks Red Bull and Aston Martin were doing with their tires.

I don't claim to be at the level of any of the technical specialists in F1, but I have raced for a few years, and my entire working life has been in the automotive industry, including a lot of years diagnosing tire “failures” for warranty claims, and from the beginning I have thought there was ZERO chance that this was defective tires. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when first talking about this, that only 2 tires failing, and only during the race, and both being the lesser loaded of the tires to blow just doesn't add up to defective tires to me. And we all know that F1 teams would never try to bend the rules (cough, cough flexible rear wings cough, cough) and figure out how to get around the FIA's inspections to gain an advantage. It's also interesting that the blowouts happened to the 2 teams that, arguably, had the biggest increase in performance from the previous race.

The good news for us is we will be at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park this weekend for some in-person racing. We will be creating some content for our Rising Star Jonathan Woolridge for his first Toyo Tires F1600 race, and of course with our luck, Kyle Steckly is also out for his first race at Flamboro this weekend as well. Good luck to both drivers, we'll update you on their race weekends next week.