Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Grab bag of racing news

Time for some racing amuse-bouche...

Michael Schumacher did not win the F1 World Championship on Sunday, but his team-mate became the first Brazilian to win a Brazilian Grand Prix since 1993.

Speaking of Brazil, Alex Barros will leave World Superbike after just one year and return to MotoGP with the hopelessly underfunded D'Antin Pramac Ducati team. Hopefully this means that our friend Liam's job will be safe.

There was a V8 Supercar race this weekend in Surfers Paradise but I don't know who won, because I still haven't finished watching Bathurst. I've been waiting for my Australian friend to come round to watch it with me, but our schedules appear to be incompatible.

The Kronos Citroen World Rally team will return to a red livery in this weekend's Rally Australia. Apparently the sponsorship deal with Gauloises was only for 13 rounds, which seems rather odd to me. So the Xsaras will once again look like the old factory team cars. Which they are. The charade is over. Kronos Citroen was never anything less than a full factory effort...

Many rumours of new cars in the Le Mans Series both here in the US and in Europe. These include six Audi R10s for Europe; Zyteks in both series; Creations in both series; up to 8 Corvettes in the LMES; Bobby Rahal running a Porsche in GT2 in ALMS; Martin Short's Rollcentre team running a Pescarolo in Europe; Lister using a Pescarolo tub for its new prototype; up to 8 of Porsche's RS Spyder Evo running worldwide; at least 2 new Radicals joining the LMES; and Peugeot coming to Sebring (although maybe not to race, just to test).

There's rumblings about the FIA GT series being in trouble. Not sure why this is yet, but if I hear anything I'll post it.

In an interesting coincidence Rolling Stone just ran an article about rallying, highlighting the exploits of Travis Pastrana, who just this weekend secured the Rally America title.

In AMA Superbike, the silly season is almost complete. Jason Pridmore retired, so Aaron Yates will probably take his place at Jordan Suzuki. His factory Suzuki seat goes to Tommy Hayden. Hayden is replaced at Kawasaki by Jamie Hacking. Hacking's Yamaha Supersport and Superstock ride goes to Ben Bostrom who was left unemployed after the departure of Ducati. Meanwhile, Yamaha will enter Superbike with Eric Bostrom and Jason DiSalvo.

All for now...

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