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On Sunday, April 2, 2006 I made a rare appearance at a street course to watch the Indy Racing League, Indy Infiniti Pro Series, and the SCCA SPEED World Challenge Touring Races. I bought tickets for me and my father only a few days before going to Florida, but was quite happy with the seats I had in the Turn 1 Grandstands. The tickets had a price tag of $80 a piece which was a little steep in my book, but I guess they were not outrageous for this type of event. We decided to show up early and we found a parking spot about 4 blocks from the track and then, after picking up our tickets at will-call, walked around the SCCA pits. These SCCA World Challenge race cars are pretty cool. While I’m not sure what changes are allowed to the cars, they really are regular road cars turned into racing cars – and they really look good going around the track. While the winner, driving a Mazda 6, started up front it was still a fun race, and since I own a Mazda 6 I was happy to see the “zoom zoom” car win. The Indy Pro Series race was not as exciting. I think if they had a few more cars it would have been better. The Indy car race was pretty good and we didn’t get to see some pretty nice racing moves and passes in turn 1. Unfortunately with these types of tracks you can not see most of the track. Luckily, for these bigger races, the promoters try to address this by putting up big “jumbo-trons” around the track. Thanks to the one in front of us we were able to keep track of what was going on. The race was pretty interesting, esp. with the different pit strategies at the end. Helio Castroneves won the race. While I like Helio I would have rather seen a non-Penske car win. The one driver I wanted to see how he would perform was PJ Chesson. He wasn’t all that impressive in his first IndyCar road course start (it may have actually been his first ever road course start). I’m sure the car he was driving wasn’t really up to par either, but he seemed like a fish out of water on the road course. Hopefully, with some more seat time the former Sprint Car driver from New Jersey can get some good finishes on the ovals this year though.

My 2006 season race watching stats after St. Petersburg:

Races: 8
Tracks: 5 (3 new)
States: 4 (1 new)