ALMS Petit Le Mans 12-21-12

For a 12-hour race, understandably the ABC coverage was truncated. I do wonder where the race was broadcast live. I pitied the announcer. By the end of the show, it sounded like he had called the entire race. Speaking of the broadcast team, I was pleased to indulge in my Kelli Stavast fixation during the pit reports. She just has a devastating smile and a great voice, not to mention an infectious enthusiasm.

I thought the big news of the race was the complete lack mentioning of the "merger." More accurately, it was a buyout by the NASCAR owned Grand-Am series. The new entity is going to be called ISCAR.

ISCAR.

ISCAR?

I sincerely hope they haven't bought any letterhead or anything else with that name on it and can go ahead and change that. Perhaps somewhere in the original 12-hour broadcast they discussed it, otherwise this looks really bad. This is the biggest news in ALMS history after all and the show was produced by ALMS (with ESPN personnel). On the other hand, the merger doesn't happen until 2014, so why bother bringing it up? It's probably a sore subject around the ALMS offices.

Another questionable item was the 2013 schedule. The announcers brought up that Mid-Ohio was off the schedule. That's a terrible loss as far as I'm concerned. It just looks so good on TV.

One of the more exciting things about the race for me was finally getting to see the Delta Wing concept car in action. This was just a non-points, test run, but it seemed to be doing very well. Unfortunately, they cut out the car's final fate, so I don't know how it ended up. (Quick look up, it finished fifth overall.) It truly looks like nothing else on track and is jarringly out of place. It also looks good though. There were even people dressed as Batman (the drivers?) posing with it. Dear IRL, you people are so stupid that you didn't pick this to be your car of the future.

Coverage of the night portion of the race was interesting, but really, if done right, it should look terrifying. I've gotten sweaty palms just reading an account of night racing at Le Mans. They likely needed to show more scary in-car views.

It was definitely worth watching just to see that silver Ferrari. By silver I mean a shiny, mirror finish with an awesome paint scheme on top of it. The producers must have known how eye-catching it was, since it was constantly on screen. In the race itself the Ferrari beat the corvette on fuel mileage for a class win. Wow, the NASCAR influence is already becoming apparent.