While the eyes of Texas (amongst others) are focused upon some ‘lil ol frilling' RASSCAR barbeque going' on down in Florida, I just had to watch The SPEED Report to see if there had been any further leaks to the media on the Indiana big shots business trip to the Orient…
And wallah, there was the ‘ol leak master himself… Hey Robin,
What are you doin?' Leaking that story about Tony & Co. possibly getting together, aren’t you aware of the firestorm you’ve created?
But hey, isn’t that your job as a reporter?
And apparently Nicole Manske must have been wandering’ the motor coach parking lots, as she and her sidekick had the night off… Or did they jump ship to a bigger network?
So, I'm glad that Bob Varsha brought up the matter during his interview with Robin, who noted that if the deal falls thru, it could still very well be over if Carl Haas and Derrick Walker decided to jump ship? Miller noted that Walker already has an IRL chassis in his shop and that Champ Car owes him about $1.5 million as they haven’t paid anybody their prize money from last season…
And that was pretty amazing that Robin 'N Open Wheel got to be the second story behind RASSCAR for a whole four minutes. Speaking’ about Kevin “What Memo” Kalkhoven, I enjoyed Robin’s comments on the nature of his being all over the map on the subject, claiming that it was one of his own owners who leaked the previous merger talks to Autoweek. Kevin’s just confused…
Next, I decided to listen to Speed Freaks to see if they’d have anything to say about the current status of Open Wheels possible consolidation…
So, prior to introducing Booby Ruble, Kenny Sergeant went on a rant ‘bout Little E having the worst uniform ever, saying it has Grandpa pockets and is looser fitting than ‘ol Jack Vanilla’s leisure suits…
Let’s welcome CART Champion, Indy 500 Champion, etc Bobby Rahal… Bobby did you ever have any ugly uniforms? Well I don’t know if it was ugly? But back in 1989 when I drove for Kraco, my uniform had a lot of yellow win it. In fact it had so much yellow that Arie Luyendyk constantly called me Big Bird!
And Crash Gladys said, I’ve got to ask you about the status of Open Wheel or I’ll get deluged with emails… So, do you know anything we don’t? NO, I just read what gets reported; I read SPEED and the SPEED TV Forums… Robin Miller probably knows the most about what’s going on…
Of course, I think we’ve been down this road about 15 times in the last 15 years, so, hopefully this will be the last year we have to worry about this.
Later in the program, Gladys talked with Indy Star’s Kurt Cabin to see what the latest was? Kurt said he felt like it was a bit of a ping pong match trying to get information… Hoping he’d be the first to break the story. I spoke to Brian Barnhart about 4hrs ago and he was just finishing breakfast before going to the meeting. Hopefully they’ll answer their phones and have something to tell us. But hey, a merged single Open Wheel schedule would be a good thing, of course there’d be some contracts to settle, but Tony’s got a checkbook and it would be a lot cheaper to go to Kansas over going to Europe…
