Barber Motorsports Park – IZOD Indy Car Series Preview

If Team Penske wins another IZOD Indy Car race at Barber Motorsports Park this weekend, they may have to consider changing the name of the place.

After the 2013 season-opening win by James Hinchcliffe for Andretti Autosports at St.Petersburg, FL, the IICS heads to Birmingham for the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama with Team Penske and Chevrolet heavily favored to find victory lane.

Team Penske has won all three races and poles since the series first came to the 2.38-mile, 17-turn road course in 2010. Will Power has captured the last two events (and the 2010-11 poles), while Helio Castroneves won the inaugural Barber event and the 2012 pole; all in Chevrolet-powered mounts.

As a matter-of-fact, since rejoining the Indy circuit last year, the Bowtie Brigade has captured twelve series races to just four for Honda.

Points-leader Hinchcliffe, whose St. Pete win was his first ever in the series, leads the early-season points race over Castroneves, Marco Andretti, Tony Kanaan and Scott Dixon.

Twenty-six cars are entered this week, with Tristan Vautier (Schmidt Peterson) and A.J. Allmendinger (Team Penske) making their first-ever Indy Car starts at BMP. There is a TBA sign hanging on the second Dale Coyne entry as St. Pete-starter Ana Beatriz is out this week; and as usual Coyne is still making up his mind as to a replacement.

Past series champions have not fared very well so far in 2013 as Ryan Hunter-Reay, the reigning series champion is looking to bounce-back after mechanical problems dropped him to an 18th place finish in Florida. Last year’s Indianapolis 500 winner and four-time series champ Dario Franchitti has nowhere to go but up this week after an early-race crash gave him a 25th-place finish in March.

Hinchcliffe’s Andretti Autosports teammate Marco Andretti found early-season success at St. Petersburg with a podium finish behind ‘Hinch’ and Castroneves. Andretti seems to finish well at BMP, with two top-five finishes in three starts.

Simona De Silvestro was almost a podium finisher at St. Pete two weeks ago, but slipped to sixth at the finish in her first race for KV Racing Technology in a Chevrolet. She struggled last season in an underpowered Lotus entry, finishing 20th at Barber, but hopes for better on Sunday as she learns to work with a teammate (Tony Kanaan) for the first time. “At the beginning of testing (at St. Pete and Barber), we were starting to learn how to do that (communicate with each other),”she noted recently. “I’ve never had to do that in the past for years. In the evening we talked about it (how they were running). Also after the sessions, we talked about what we ran, what they ran, what we experienced, even after the race.”

MY PICK: At St. Pete, Takuma Sato almost made me look good with his front-row start and eighth-place finish. So we’re going out on a limb again and choosing Simona De Silvestro to bring her Chevy home first for Kevin Kalkhoven and Jimmy Vasser. She tested well at Barber and with Tony Kanaan’s help, she could grab her first win.

Honda Grand Prix of Alabama Notes:
• The Foyt-Sato combination started the St. Pete race on the front row and finished 8th right out of the box. This was a pairing that many had doubts about, but AJ should be a good mentor for the crash-prone Sato.
• If Dallara finds its way to victory lane-and they should, given all starters are running their chassis- it will be the 200th win for the Italian manufacturer that began making IndyCars in 1997.
• Former MLB and NFL veteran Bo Jackson will be Grand Marshal for the race. Jackson, a native of Birmingham, AL, was a Heisman Trophy winner at Auburn University. He will get a ride with two-time Indy 500 winner Arie Luyendyk in the IZOD/Honda sponsored two-seater.
• The race will be telecast on NBC Sports Network beginning at 3:00pm (Eastern), and broadcast on SiriusXM Channel 211.
• The race will cover 90 laps-214 miles over the picturesque course which many liken to Road America.
• No driver has ever won at Barber and gone on to win that season’s series championship.

Paul Gohde

Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.

Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.

The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.

Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.

He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.

Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”

racingnation.com

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