Oilpressure

Good morning from an absolutely gorgeous Barber Motorsports Park. Not only is the facility its usual gorgeous self, but you could not ask for a better day weather-wise. There is not a cloud in the sky and it is supposed to stay that way through the rest of the race weekend. the high today is supposed to be 78-degrees. Tomorrow’s high is expected to reach 82, without a cloud in sight.

Between the IndyCars, the Mazda Road to Indy and the Pirelli World Challenge, there is non-stop track activity on the schedule today from 8:00 am until after 7:00 tonight. Tomorrow’s on-track schedule begins at 9:00 and concludes with the IndyCar race that will end around 5:00. If you live within driving distance of this track, you should make a day trip out of it today and/or tomorrow.

As I arrived at the track, Indy Lights qualifying was taking place. Next on the track are the Pirelli World Challenge cars for qualifying and the GTS Race No.2. That goes until 10:45, then the Verizon IndyCar Series takes the track for the final practice before this afternoon’s qualifying.

I’m beginning to think that yesterday was no fluke, as far as the performance of Honda is concerned. Remember, Barber is where Graham Rahal’s resurgence began last season. I’m not sure we’ll see both Foyt cars in the Firestone Fast Six this afternoon, but I’ll be shocked if Honda doesn’t have adequate representation this week.

I will be keeping my eye on the No.41 of Jack Hawksworth this morning. His driving skills have not been shown since he joined Foyt at the beginning of last season. He has done well in practice some weekends, but falters in qualifying. Now that some personnel changes have taken place on his side of the team after Long Beach, I’ll be very curious to see how Hawksworth does in qualifying today.

But I’m also not convinced that the top Chevy teams were not giving it their all yesterday. Something tells me that we’ll see more familiar names at the front of the grid tomorrow than were leading the field yesterday.

With the success that Honda had yesterday, it’s still a little perplexing that the cars of Andretti Autosport were still lagging behind. Ryan Hunter-Reay was the quickest of the Andretti cars, but that only got him eleventh quick of the day. Carlos Muñoz was just behind in twelfth. Marco Andretti is still a head-scratcher and could only muster the sixteenth quickest lap of the day, and Alexander Rossi was dead last.

I kind of like having two cars here. Susan’s idea of arriving early at the track differs from mine. When I left, she was still sipping in coffee lounging in bed. I can be a slug with the best of them. I can do that next weekend. But today, I have a race track to go to so I’ll forego the sleep. I expect Susan to be here somewhere around 11:00. But be sure and check back because she’ll be posting about the different sights around here and some of the merchandizing offerings here – the god and the bad.

In the meantime, follow us both on Twitter for instantaneous pictures and comments. My Twitter account is @Oilpressureblog while Susan’s is @MrsOilpressure. Check back throughout the day.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on April 23, 2016 at 9:36 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.