MESA, Ariz. — The racing world might have lingering effects of Kyle Larson Double Attempt Fatigue Syndrome.
Reigning NASCAR Cup Series champion Ryan Blaney says he and fellow Team Penske driver Scott McLaughlin, from the IndyCar side, have chatted about them both trying to win the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 in the same day. Now, NHRA Funny Car driver Austin Prock says he’d be up for Indy car action.
Who knows how serious any of them is about carrying out the punishing plan? But Blaney told Autoweek’s Deb Williams, “Racers are always curious about other series. You want to see what the similarities and the differences are between different cars. Indy cars, obviously, was something that I grew up really enjoying watching as well as the NASCAR scene. I loved watching Roger’s cars growing up. I remember listening on the radio when (Sam) Hornish won the 500.”
Josef Newgarden gave team owner Roger Penske his 20th Indianapolis 500 victory on Memorial Day weekend and Blaney indicated he and McLaughlin wouldn’t mind bringing a little extra drama to Team Penske next May.
“I’ve been trying to start a petition … of me and Scottie Mac (McLaughlin) doing the double. I don’t think that’s ever been done. So that would be kind of neat, both of us doing the double in the same year. That would be a lot of headaches for a lot of people over at Team Penske, but I think that’d be pretty cool,” Blaney said.
But what might be the wildest twist in all such talk is what the John Force Racing camp fantasized about during the June 13-14 race weekend at Bristol (Tenn.) Dragway.
A wine-inspired idea struck Force, who was seriously injured in a crash at Virginia Motorsports Park on June 21, and he said to Prock, “What if we just whipped an Indy car on ’em?”
Prock asked, “You going to drive?”
“You want to see me kill myself?” Force shot back. “What about you?”
Without hesitation, Prock said, “I’d do it in a minute. Yep, I’d hop in it in a heartbeat.”
“That’d be a big jump. I’ve never been there. Maybe I’ll rent a car,” Force mused. “We’ve got to keep the media on their toes.”
Prock was a willing accomplice in all this banter. He said, “Trust me – this will be headline.”
“That kind of excited me,” Force said. “We haven’t gone there yet. Rahal (son-in-law and Indy car veteran Graham Rahal) will take me and slap me around (and say,) ‘Why would you even say that?’ But I always looked for stuff that was exciting.”
Force marveled that Prock “jumped from the midgets to the dragsters to the Funny Cars, and he just never misses a lick. And he just keeps doing good.”
Tony Stewart is one of only a few brave men to gravitate to drag racing after excelling first in IndyCar, and then NASCAR. And the notion startled Stewart a little bit, but he said, “My recommendation for John would be: ‘Don’t get in it.’ He doesn’t have anything to prove. He’s the GOAT, and he doesn’t need to prove anything to anybody. Austin, he could — he ran his midget out of our shop at TSR for years.
“If he wants to do it … you’ve got to follow your dreams. I’ve learned in my career, ‘Don’t ever say never.’ If that’s what he wants to do and gets an opportunity, we would obviously do whatever we could to help out the best way we can. But I haven’t been in a car in 23 years, so there’s a lot of stuff that has changed in the sport, especially in IndyCar, that I am totally clueless on now,” he said.
Given his close relationship with A.J. Foyt, Stewart said he wouldn’t mind discussing it with the legend: “I would make a call on his behalf.” But he warned, “That guy’s a little more hard-headed than even I am, the big boss over there, so I don’t know how that goes over. But it would be fun to see him (Prock) have the opportunity.”
Prock has risen to the top of each discipline he has sampled, so if he made a serious bid to race an Indy car, hardly a person who knows anything about him would doubt him. Prock is cut from the same cloth as Danny Ongais, Stewart and the late John Andretti.
Plenty of modern-era Indy car notables — such as Hornish, Dario Franchitti, Juan Pablo Montoya and Danica Patrick — have given NASCAR a whirl. And Formula 1 stars Fernando Alonso and Romain Grosjean have followed in Graham Hill’s path to Indy. Mario Andretti went the other direction and proved himself in other racing sanctions, as did Foyt, Dan Gurney, Roger McCluskey and Jimmy Bryan, among others.
Experimenting in another series is nothing new, although Stewart’s move to drag racing might be the boldest in recent years. Newgarden once said he’d enjoy learning about it because “it’s a different art.” However, Townsend Bell, a former IndyCar driver and current TV racing commentator, spoke for many racers when he recounted his one brush with the straightline sport.
Bell, a friend of Funny Car drivers Ron Capps and Jon Capps, remembered standing at the NHRA Christmas Tree.
“My eyes were watering, and I couldn’t breathe. I’m already intimidated, if not concerned,” he said. “I have never felt more violated than standing next to a Top Fuel car as it launched. It’s utterly terrifying, and I have no desire to do it again. I can’t imagine what it’s like sitting inside. The only way I can describe it was I just felt totally violated.”
THIS ARTICLE IS REPOSTED FROM THE July 3 EDITION OF SPEED SPORT INSIDER
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