Saturday, April 19, 2008

Ten reasons to watch the unified IRL

The Indy Racing League has finally merged with ChampCar. It's time to start rebuilding open wheel racing in America. Here are my current top ten reasons you should watch a race:

10. The races are shorter than most sporting events including NASCAR races, usually clocking in at under two hours.

9. The cars are (much) faster.

8. They named an entire sports league after the city of Indianapolis.

7. Unlike the IHSAA, the IRL appears to be dedicated to rebuilding its storied past.

6. They race at places with cool names like Twin Ring Montegi, Long Beach, and Surfer's Paradise. Sounds like a Mario Kart circuit.

5. The sport gets precious little media coverage, but its few writers are snarky loners who hate NASCAR.

4. The league isn't sponsored by a souless wireless carrier with unbelievably poor customer service (yet).

3. They have two and sometimes three generations of Foyts, Rahals and Andrettis involved in the sport.

2. They have teams co-owned by both Paul Newman (badass), David Letterman (badass) and Patrick Dempsey (non-badass).

1. Sometimes Mario still hops in a car and insane things happen.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know much about Indy Car Racing, but I do find it fascinating to watch. And how cool is it that quite a few of the comments on that Mario Andrettti footage page were in Italian?!

Joshua said...

I'm going to watch just because you took a shot at the IHSAA. Class basketball sucks!