Saturday, August 9, 2008

Live from Kentucky Speedway: 2 Hours to Pre-Race

A great day for a drive today from Indianapolis down I65 through Madison, Indiana and along the Kentucky side of Ohio River. Right now I'm live from the media center at Kentucky Speedway. When I got to the credential building at 2:30, the line was out into the parking lot and traffic was already backing up with fans getting to the parking lot. I've heard the race sold out yesterday and they started selling some standing room tickets today. The green flag flies at 6:36 tonight and they'll run into the twilight under the lights. I'm loving these Saturday night races!

It should be a great show with 26 cars starting the race behind Scott Dixon on pole with Meira 2nd and Wheldon 3rd. I'm sticking with my darkhorse candidate, Hideki Mutoh, to contend for the win. He will start 4th and has so far this weekend outshone his other AGR teammates, with Kanaan 7th and Marco 9th. Danica is starting shotgun on the field after crashing in practice and missing qualifying, so it will be very interesting to see how she fares coming up through the pack. She may have to play a track position game to make up ground. She'll have to wend her way through a number of the transition team drivers as they did not qualify well. The biggest surprise to me was Marty Roth who will start 11th. Servia and Power with KV are the highest starting transition team drivers in 12th & 13th. The Vision team continues to start well with Carpenter 8th and Foyt 10th. We'll see how well they race, as this is a track where speed and handling both matter. A pole speed of 218+ is plenty fast for a 1.5 mile oval and race laps over 210 should be the norm. Two-wide and three-wide racing is also expected and that should make for an exciting race, and good photo ops.

Everything's a photo op when you get right down to it, so today it will be another challenge with the skies darkening and the Musco light system firing up as the event wears on. Then the Indy Lights take the track so it will be a long night. Back again soon with more.

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