Richmond International Raceway, Richmond VA, June 24 2005 2005 June 28
Friday morning we left to goto Richmond International Raceway for the weekend. Richmond is the 13th track I’ve been to year and Virginia was the 9′th state of the year that I saw a race in. On tap was the IRL IndyCar series and the USAC National Sprints and Silver Crown Series. Friday night we saw IRL qualifying, Silver Crown qualifying, and the Sprint car qualifying and race. One nice thing USAC did was instead of having a last chance race for the Silver Crown series which would have seen only two or three drivers get sent home, they decided to cancel the last chance race scheduled for Friday night and put everyone into Saturday’s feature.
Qualifying for the series was rather uneventful except for Tony Kanann having a spin while trying to qualify his IndyCar. This relegated him to the last place starting spot. Next to last was Danica Patrick*. Penske cars were on the front row.
The USAC Sprint car race was 60 laps total, but their was a fuel break at 30 laps. Bobby East dominated the first 45 or so laps of the race, however towards the end Bobby Santos III was closing and with about 6 laps to go he dived below East to apparently take the lead, however he couldn’t hold it ands spun out. At the time Santos was a lot faster then East so I thought he should have been a little more patient and he would have easily gotten by East in the next lap or two. As it turns out, Santos didn’t even have to pass East because East was disqualified because his car was too light. According to East’s father (and car owner) the reason they were light was because they were overheating and lost all of the water in the engine. After East was DQed the win was giving to Ron Gregory.
My 2005 racing stats after the June 24′th race at Richmond:
Races: 21
Tracks: 13 (5 new)
States: 9 (0 new)
* The attractive female Indy Car driver who has been getting so much attention lately, who, by the way, has never won an automobile race.