This week’s edition of the Friday Morning Heat Race comes to you from the Buckeye State where we are happily visiting family. From hot laps to the main event, here’s what’s on our mind this week.
Hot Laps: Time Flies
It’s been 60 years since Jim Clark won the Indianapolis 500, 50 years since Bobby Unser won his second in a rain-shortened debacle, 40 years since Danny Sullivan’s spin-and-win victory and 30 years since Jacques Villeneuve’s Indy conquest.
Qualifying: Watch It Live
SPEED SPORT 1 will offer live racing of the Speed Tour formula car series from scenic Road America this Sunday (May 18) at 10:30 a.m.
For those wanting to add to their Memorial Day weekend racing fix, SS1 will present live coverage of Trans Am racing from Lime Rock Park on Saturday, May 24 and on Monday May 26.
First Heat: All Star Race Participants
The NASCAR All-Star Race for the NASCAR Cup Series is the headliner for what is truly becoming All-Star weekend at North Wilkesboro (N.C.) Speedway.
Over four days, competitors in the CARS Tour late model stock and pro late model divisions, the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour and Craftsman Truck Series will compete on the five-eighths-mile track as a lead into Sunday night’s $1 million-to-win headliner.
Only the NASCAR Xfinity Series is left out of the four-day celebration of things stock car racing.
Second Heat: Open Wheelers
At one point during Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Kansas Speedway, drivers who started their careers in open-wheel cars (Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell, Chase Briscoe and Alex Bowman) ran in the top four spots.
Larson won, with Bell second, Briscoe fourth and Bowman fifth. Who finished third? Ryan Blaney, whose dad (Dave), uncle (Dale) and grandpa (Lou) all raced sprint cars.
Third Heat: New Sheriff?
It looks like there may be a new sheriff in two in the USAC AMSOIL National Sprint Car Series. Kyle Cummins, who swept last weekend’s races at Tri-State and Bloomington Speedways, has won five of the first 11 races of the season. Cummins, who has 25 career USAC victories, is shooting for 20 wins this season.
The single-season record for the series is 14, which is shared by Tom Bigelow (1977) and reigning series champion Logan Seavey (2024).
Dash: Sentimental Favorite
My sentimental favorite to win the Indianapolis 500 is Ryan Hunter-Reay. A former 500 winner and IndyCar Series champion, Hunter-Reay deserves one of the rides occupied by check writers. Still, he has a legitimate shot to contend driving one of the two entries fielded by Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, which runs only the Indianapolis 500 on the IndyCar schedule.
B Main: What’s The Format?
For more than half of my life, the format for qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 was simple — fastest 33 cars by speed, by day.
In recent years, it has gotten slightly more complicated, and I need to brush up on it every May.
All 33 cars will make attempts on Saturday, with positions 13 through 30 locked into the 109th Indianapolis 500 on May 25.
The top 12 will run twice on Sunday, with the field trimmed to nine before the Fast Six run for the pole. The four slowest entries on Saturday will be back Sunday for Bump Day qualifying with the slowest car missing the 33-car field.
Feature: Fan Following
As the years pass, the opinion I am about to share becomes more of an outlier than the norm, but I believe the Indianapolis 500 needs more representation from other forms of motorsports — drivers who various fan bases can get behind.
Kyle Larson, the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series champion and three-time Knoxville Nationals winner, is about it in this year’s field, though, we do remember Ed Carpenter raced sprint cars three decades ago.
Larson’s presence like that of Jimmie Johnson, Fernando Alonso, Bryan Clauson and Kurt Busch in recent years and Cale Yarborough, Bobby Allison, Rich Vogler, Jim Clark and others in the past brought greater interest in what was going on in Indianapolis during the month of May.
It is my opinion that more drivers with existing fan bases participating in the Indianapolis 500 will do far more for the event than having Johnson drive a two-seat Indy car with a former football player (Tom Brady) turned talking head riding shotgun on the parade lap.
More Kody Swansons and Max Verstappens, fewer Richard Schwartzmans and Devlin Defrancescos.
