Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Yesterday we witnessed a historic running of the legendary Indianapolis 500. For the first time in the race’s history, a woman led the race. Whatsmore, she was in the lead very near the end of the race and came quite close to victory.

Of course I’m talking about Danica Patrick. She qualified fourth and finished fourth. That’s a damned good race for anyone, especially a rookie.

Her appearance is undoubtedly welcome by the bigwigs in the IRL. Not that I’m representative of the typical American race fan, but this is one of the first years when I didn’t pay attention at all to qualifying. Moreover, the only open-wheeled form of racing I like to watch these days is Formula One. Had it not been for the buzz over Danica, I might have totally missed the occurrance of the whole race.

The race wasn’t too bad, but I must say that I thought the announcers were horrendous. Actually, the whole broadcast didn’t seem tight. For instance, F1 races in the country are a broadcast of the world feed with announcers going solely by that feed. At Indy, we had a whole team at the race who were butchering it.

And in accordance with the buzz, it seemed like every other word out of their mouth was “Danica”. I nearly went into hysterical laughter at one point. She had just cracked back into to the top 10 after earlier stalling her car during a pit stop. The commentators took note adding something about how she was “right back in this race.” That is high comedy to anyone used to watching that race. It turned out they were right, but it was not at all as if she had charged her way to the front by passing 9 cars on the track.

At this point, I guess the IRL really doesn’t have to worry about alienating its fan base, if there is such a thing. They desperately need big names with public recognition. I don’t see this bringing that series to the forefront, however.

If ABC continues to singularly cover one driver throughout the whole race, I might just have to get off my couch and do something productive.