CLEYYZYEGSJC (part one)

Yes, those of you who travel through our nation’s sometimes-friendly skies will decode the airport codes of our last four races. And that’s how they seemed to me, going by in a huge blur this year as I alternated between long days on the road and long nights on the drawing board at home. But give up show business? With you people? Never…

CLE (Hopkins Int’l Airport)

I landed Wednesday night in a huge electrical storm. Omen for the weekend.

We broke in a new flag chief this year, Bill Crowe, and he passed with flying colors. He and ex-chief turned race chairman Lauri Burkons had their work cut out for them as this is a annually a thinly attended race as marshals go. On top of that the Grand-Am Series was running down at Mid-Ohio, The June Sprints (ok, shoot me for leaving out the trademark) were up at Elkhart, and F1 was running in Montreal (although ASRQ’s Diane Dery came all the way from Quebec to be with the Champ Cars, bless her.) Nonetheless we did some prodding, recruiting and arm twisting and by Sunday we had just over 40 marshals, more than half from outside Ohio. And let me tell you and I do not say this lightly, what this crew lacked in numbers it more than made up for in talent. It may have been marshal for marshal one of the most experienced groups ever put together. I thank Bill, Lauri and each member of this Marshal crew , especially those who came down from Canada and over from the west coast, for being there and boy were you needed!!


STANDING STARTS BY THE START STAND

We chose the wide open runway to reunite the Mazda Atlantics with their much missed standing starts and both races we did with them during the weekend were right on the button. No jumps, nothing, and smooth runs through the first turn! It’s almost like a regular start, first time by, except they come to a stop on the line before the lights and then go, so it’s simpler than the FIA version. The cars grid in the pits, start engines, are led around by the pace car, the pace car pulls in, the cars pull up to their grid spots marked my a single member of their own crew, the grid clears of non-driver humans, a green flag waves all clear at the back of the grid, a 30 and a 15 sec board are shown by JD Wilbur from the start stand (who gives a nice commentary during all this on the land line) and then 4 red lights are lit in 1 second intervals, and then they all go off within 1-3 seconds and we have a race. Doesn’t take much longer to do than to read, and speaking for myself, it will be a great treat to see it done with the Champ Cars. There are some among the Champ Car driver ranks who feel we might reduce some first corner accidents by the sheer result of arriving a little bit slower and having a bit more time to make the right decision… I SAID MIGHT, DIDN’T I???


“SUNUVABITCH”

That’s right, that’s what I said on the land line as the only way to describe how the Champ Car race was going about 1/3 of the way into it. I don’t try on these occasions to mask my feelings, nor those of Race Control on such a difficult day. Wow. Incident after incident, in multiples, sometimes at opposite ends of the track and even the Sunday Atlantic race had tons of action, which certainly got us ready for the big one. You know all the hits from this one, but My Favorite moment had to be that now famous “CRACK” that is heard on the land line immediately followed by a loud buzz and some forlorn voice calling faintly that some poor soul has smacked the wall big time and taken part of the system down. Joysville. So this time it was Car 9 crunching the wall at turn 4, which had to be called in by turn 9 which is right behind turn 4 as turn 4’s landline went kablooie as a result of the impact. Not 5 seconds later, Car 4, who was leading at the time pulls off out of fuel over at turn 7… 4?... 9?... Turn 9?... Wha?... Who? Needless to say they were called in together while turn 4 was desperately trying to be heard at the same time. It took a while to figure out, and for about 30 seconds I just assume that 4 and 9 had hit each other, which was not the case. Sunuvabitch.

But sometimes those days are to be endured and looked back upon as days that make us all stronger and again my supreme thanks go out to all who helped us through a long weekend.


110%

One closing thought that I will share was an incident in turn one during the race after a restart that left a piece of sharp debris on line. While the cars were over on the other side of the circuit, we asked turn one if they had enough time to retrieve it and they said yes. So out went Brendan Crowe (Bill’s son,) and it turned out he made a hell of a long run there and back as the posts are located so far from the runway surface. He went out with a backup plan, hustled as hard as he could and made it all the way back albeit sans whistle (which I now have and will send back his way,) and some scuffed knees. It turned out to be a mighty ask and was responded to by a mighty effort. It’s not something we want to do all the time, but it was the supreme effort that went noticed. We don’t take unnecessary risks in this series, not after what we have been through, and that’s why we seldom do interventions with marshals (and only under well-controlled circumstances.) Brendan was dispatched by race control after we and turn one had sized up the situation.

On occasion, Race Director Tony Cotman, is questioned about using these “old school” ways of dealing with these matters when we could just throw another yellow, or leave it be. His specific response to this incident was “We don’t use the Marshals a lot for these things, but when we do we have very good results. If I see fit to call upon them, we will.”

Thanks, Brendan for your 110% effort.


YYZ (Lester Pierson Int’l Airport)

On to TO. The new hip moniker for Toronto, one of my favorite (excuse me, favourite) cities on the tour. For those of you who have never been, think of Chicago, only cleaner and everyone gets along.

My heartfelt thanks go out to our brothers-in-white who turn out in good numbers under Flag Chief Peter Corley’s direction. You all have a great attitude and you get the job done, enjoying yourselves at the same time (A number of years ago Gil de Ferran asked “can we take these people everywhere?”) The general culture of the Canadians just seems to be gentler than in the US, and I have a friend who jokes that the Canadians can even make the Swiss look mean.

I had the rare pleasure of having my wife Diane at the track, but I can’t say honestly she was 100% there for the race. One of our favourite groups, Great Big Sea, www.greatbigsea.com kind of a folk-pub-celtic-rock band from Newfoundland were playing Saturday night just across Lakeshore Blvd. from the racetrack at the Molson Amphitheatre, just within earshot of turn three. They brought the “houwse” down (as the Canadians say it, eh) as it was the end of their summer tour. A great way to forget about the stresses of the racetrack for one night! Thank you dear…


CHECKERED PAST

On occasion, when the moment warrants it, we will stop and recognize a job very well done and it was my pleasure at the Sunday briefing. Nick Fornoro was the original CART starter, who did 200 events, I succeeded him with 171, and JD Wilbur is up there now and I haven’t counted his up yet. We figured that after us three, and all of our assistants who waved checkered flags at Champ Cars in an “official” capacity, that the “civilian” who holds the record for most checkers displayed to Champ Cars has to be Toronto’s Peter Zigomanis. We presented him with a Champ Car Driver autographed checkered flag in front of his home crowd in recognition of his work, not only here in TO, but also other to the other events he works with us. Peter has been stationed at several of the events he travels to each year at the “Timeline” which is the point just before the pit entrance where the cars are timed from on Friday and Saturday, eliminating cool down laps. I thank Peter for his skill, timing, reliability, flexibility, endurance and good humour in this task. We’re all countin’ on ya!

to be continued...