Race Weekend Central

Happiness Is… Comics, Geeks and a Prelude to a Big Weekend

The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season is 11 races old, nearly a third done already. So it’s worth mentioning that this stretch is the latest Jimmie Johnson has gone in a season without winning since, well, he invented the sport. Where has the golden horseshoe gone? It’s hard to argue that it’s been lost, as Johnson still …

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Grand Prix of Indianapolis: Pagenaud ekes one out after a rough start to the race

Grand Prix of Indianapolis In a Nutshell: Simon Pagenaud and his team worked fuel and pit strategy better than any other team. After the wreck to start the race (more on that below), the race passed by in an orderly fashion until the first caution at Lap 42, which lead to three more yellows by Lap 55. …

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Happiness Is… Cornucopia, The Draft & Congress

Happiness Is is more than happy to put that lackluster display of racing, aka Talladega, down to memory. While the continued goal here is to find the positive side of motorsports, it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so with the superspeedway in Alabama. The fact that the Cup race made sure to end with a …

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Open Wheel Wednesday: Good for Indy

This column is about the inevitable, wonderful, frightening, confusing concept of change. Simple definitions for change use words like alter, modify, or become transformed. Those are all well and good. But the concept of change is something that is unavoidable and necessary. In this paradigm, change is akin to evolution, which is what ensures an …

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Happiness Is… Franchises, Barber, Work and Wrigley

At Watkins Glen International in Watkins Glen, NY on August 11, 2013.

Martin Truex, Jr.‘s No. 56 team went from full-time to part-time status in the blink of an eye.

So it was an off week in NASCAR. Did anyone miss it? Aww, c’mon, a little break never hurt. Of course, the difficulty in writing anything worthwhile about the sport becomes problematic when, you know, nothing really happened. But wait, something did. The demise of Swan Racing has taken center stage in the news cycle — …

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Happiness Is… The DVR, Will Robinson, Not Mercedes & Long Beach.

One of the easy ways to fill space in a NASCAR column for the past couple years has been to debate the role of Cup drivers in the Nationwide Series. The oft-used comparison in this argument is that drivers who dabble in Nationwide are like Major League Baseball players dropping down into the minor leagues. First, let’s …

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Happiness Is…A Story, 6, Power, and Bahrain

Martinsville is just what NASCAR needed, right? It had everything everybody wanted without talk of aero-push or aero-loose. It was like tastes great AND less filling. No way! The first thing it featured was the (somewhat overblown) feud between Kurt Busch and Brad Keselowski, complete with Kes formally addressing the camera in his post-accident interview and letting Busch, who was apparently watching …

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IndyCar Preview – Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg

It’s about time they got started! The Verizon IndyCar Series revs up this weekend with its traditional opener in St. Petersburg, Florida. Well, it’s not really one of those long-standing traditions in theory — the race has only been opening the season since 2009 — though it had usually been the second race on the …

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Happiness Is… FOX, F1, California, and Points

This racing season is off to a fantastic start. Really. Two 12-hour races in Cup. The last three Nationwide races were won by Cup drivers. The Truck Series… wait, do they still race? Even Formula One is rolling hot with derision over its new six-cylinder engine and the lack of noise it produces. And INDYCAR hasn’t even …

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