With a multiple Hours Red Flag for extensive
Stoppage time before Mother Nature won in PK’s!
Think you’d have to say that the Nashville
weekend was a “Wash” at best, Eh?
Saturday morning began with Team Penske’s David
Malukas crashing, going to Hospital and then not qualifying. Joined by Graham
Rahal’s RLLR chariot unable to get away in time and also not qualify.
Yet qualifying itself saw FOX, or was it
IndyCar drawing a yellow card for pushing the start of Qualie’ forward ten
minutes without telling anybody! In order to fit Qualie’ into FOX’s one hour
window…
As I was Cornfuzed’ when tuning into IndyCar
Radio at the advertised time of High Noon (Pacific) only to be greeted by the
third car of Caio collet on-track, What-the-Bleep?
Yet as many know, Graham’s troubles for the day
weren’t over, when hitting the wall during the day’s final qualifying session.
With Rahal being joined by Meyer Shank Racing’s (MSR) Marcus Armstrong and Dale
Coyne Racing’s Romain Grosjean. Although all three pit crews had plenty of time
to repair their damaged racecars…
And so much for that big TV ratings bump, THUD!
Listening to the entire World Cup final on my
latest “go-to” FOX sports Radio affiliate; Honolulu’s KIKI 990AM, I Arse-sumed
that IndyCar would be delaying the race’s start as my talking keychain clock
chimed 2:39PM (Pacific) when the game’s extra-time stoppage play began.
Believe it was 3:10PM when the World Cup finale
match ended? Before I ditched the broadcast and switched to IndyCar Radio, with
Mark Gravelly’ James telling us we’re in a weather delay due to nearby
lightning strikes. Although the track’s in good condition and hasn’t gotten wet
yet.
As James made the first of His multiple
inclement weather announcement at 3:16PM, before saying they’d be dropping out
for awhile, but would give the local radio station updates along the way.
So I went back to KIKI, only to be greeted by
telling me they were going to LaLa Land and the Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball
game, Stee-rike!
Back over to IndyCar Radio now playing an
episode of IndyCar Flashback, featuring the 1997 Los Wages IRL race.
As I enjoyed hearing the camaraderie between
Bob Jenkins and Gary Lee. With Mike “Yippie-Aye-eh!” King as a turn announcer
and a much younger Vince Welch and Mark James as pit reporters.
Yet the sound quality was atrocious! As the
race coverage was Blasting, Alex Wolff “Just-right” and Paul Kelly mooted,
muffled and way too low! Hmm, where’s those three Pigs, Oh Never Mind!
Surely there’ll be an hourly update as we
approached 5:00PM, Stee-rike 2! Instead simply going to a “Puff” piece by Nicky
Salt’ Yeoman, who wasn’t even at the track about IndyCar drivers training
regimens, with my clock chiming 5:03PM. Before going straight into another
canned program. With some First to the Flag episode also hosted by Messer
Yeoman. So I went off to make some dinner, since may be we’re gonna have a
night race?
Having gone round the horn of checking two
IndyCar Bloggers websites and Indycar.com, we’re still in a holding pattern –
check back later. Uhm, pretty G-Damn certain that was Stee-rike 3!
Now IndyCar Radio was playing a semi-condensed
version of last year’s Nashville race with zero commercial breaks. Instead
Yeoman would set the stage and we’d jump forward somewhere without ever giving
us a Freakin’ weather update. Come on guys, this is pathetic!
At 5:24PM I double checked that Lebanon, TN was
indeed on Central time, i.e.; two hours ahead. Wondering out loud how late they
could start a night race there?
Then finally at 6:14PM after having checked
Indycar.com multiple times. My screen reader read race delayed until Monday,
July 20th at 12 Noon (Pacific) Then the top news story said the postponement
story was from one hour ago, Huh?
As I never heard IndyCar Radio ever announce this, or give any inkling that the race had been postponed! Which I think was deserving of either a second Yellow Card or Red!