Ioná Albuquerque

The worst part is it used to be like this! You had guys like Cadalora and Capirossi who yo-yo'ed between 250s and 500cc, and even more recently, Toni Elias won Moto2 damn near at the end of his career!

Not to mention Angel Nieto who made one of the most legendary careers ever only on small bikes!

Can we get a hint as to what this rumor is?

Romain Grosjean was pretty damn French stereotypical French imo.

Is there some bored Civ player at NYT? Like what the heck lol

This is how 100s are made.

I love Pocono but Dover truly is doodoo. I like a lot of things about 90s/2000s NASCAR but God am I happy that I wasn't watching when there were two 500 mile Dover races.

Groups of four huh? I got one: BOP, drag, groove, and sway - words that racing fans hear entirely too often :P

Also, sets of three? Motherfucker, the rule of three existed before computers did lol. God some people...

I hate AI as much as the next girl but a lot of these people trying to "catch AI" are just outing themselves as dummies lol.

For some reason, the suburb of CIcero, Illinois opened two horse tracks right next to each other. Hawthorne Race Course to the south, and then Sportsman Park right across the street. In the late 90s, however, Sportsman Park was paved over to create the Chicago Motor Speedway flat oval, hosting CART and NASCAR Trucks. CART raced from 1999 to 2002, but after that, Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet overshadowed it. Chicago Motor Speedway died a quick death, being sold to the city in 2003, then demolished bit by bit from 2005 to 2009. Once CMS was demolished, the site was turned into a Wirtz Alcohol distribution center on the left, and a Walmart Supercenter on the left. To the south, Hawthorne Race Course still exists. It's apparently getting a casino too, because horse racing exists solely because of degenerate gambling.

They can always pave the other horse track!

So 17-19 in the corners? Indycar could probably still handle that.

Or do you mean increase the range so it's five degrees difference from bottom to top?

Just up the road near Buda.

Kids don't know to check who their friends are following anymore, tsk tsk tsk.

I use fictionalized names for my racing fics and it's always a godsend when I find a driver that's anything over than WASP. It instantly makes coming up with names so much.

I think the only solution for the #6 car is to go back to the Castrol Supra scheme full time. That's the only thing that has gotten this car to win.

They really do that one a lot lol. Like it's in the movie and it kicks off the final arc - false surrender is literally the string that binds all over Clone Wars together lol.

False surrender?

100% win record doesn't lie.

I took a late nap and it fucked up my sleep schedule so now I'm awake at bumfuck o'clock at night.

I can but my toxic personality trait is that I'll just keep writing and then eat later.

Being a motorsports fan means you're a lot more aware of regional cigarette brands than the average person.

I am aware, that rule came as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998. It did not have anything to do with the tobacco deals of the 1970s or the 1980s.

By the end of 2001, with Toyota and Honda on the way out, Penske switching over to the IRL, ESPN dropping their coverage, and more and more teams running one-off Indy 500 entries, they had lost the war.

And once we get to Champ Car, it's like the rump state of a once great empire clinging for life.

Don't get me wrong, I love CART. I went back to watch through the 2000 and 2001 seasons of CART race by race and they're two of my favorite seasons of racing ever, but the series was struggling without the Indy 500.

Tobacco money got them through the 90s, but once that dried up, CART was spiraling.

saw what happened when CART tried to go on without the Indy 500. Demonstrably, the worse series with the worse cars won because it had the Indianapolis 500 and CART, for all its teams, drivers, and star events, couldn't survive without that marque event.

And I'm not saying that the series wasn't in a strong era back then, but the Indy 500 was the biggest race and it was a draw in its own right - there were 40/50 cars trying to qualify for Indy while most of the other races would be lucky to see a field of 25 cars enter the race.

Plus, we literally

Marlboro protested, the Vel's Parnelli Jones team refused to drop the Viceroy sponsorship, and Marlboro left USAC after the 1971 season. They would not return to CART until 1986.

I'm sorry but that's not true. The reason Marlboro wasn't in NASCAR was that Winston signed an exclusivity deal with them, which was in fact inspired by the Viceroy debacle Indycar went through at the same time.

Marlboro signed up to sponsor USAC, but USAC's biggest team had a Viceroy sponsorship.

Eh, I'm not sure how true that is tbf. Even before the Split you had things like Ilmor building a special pushrod engine just to win the Indy 500 and Mercedes-Benz coming along to sponsor it - and only after that did they become the badging partner for Ilmor.

And for Marlboro I'm referring to 2002.

The fact that he could use the 500 to subsidize the whole series just serves to prove the point of how much more important IMS is than the other races tbf.

Hell, one of the reasons CART died is that the Master Settlement limited tobacco to one series, and Marlboro wanted to be in the 500.