Oilpressure

When I first started this site over thirteen years ago, I wasn’t really sure what my expectations should be. My childhood friend, Bruce Yarbro, kept egging me on to become an IndyCar blogger – but I didn’t really know what that meant. I looked over the many IndyCar blogs out there at the time, and felt like I was going to be out of my league. Pressdog, My Name is IRL, Planet IRL and Roy Hobson’s The Silent Pagoda all seemed to have a huge following with their outlandish takes and clever writings. I knew all of the facts and I had the passion, but I never thought I could match them with their wit.

But Bruce persisted, along with my oldest brother. Bruce even set up the site and just told me to write something and he’d insert it into the site. I reluctantly agreed and typed out a few posts. After about the third post, he basically turned the site over to me and let me handle it from there on.

I chugged along for about a month or so, getting a few comments here and there and my daily hits slowly started increasing. But by about the second month things suddenly took off, and I didn’t know why. I can see where the hits are coming from if the link has been posted elsewhere. I saw that I was getting a huge surge from Jeff Iannucci’s My Name is IRL. I clicked over to his site and saw that he had a nice write-up about the new guy over at Oilpressure.com. About two weeks later, I got a second surge of hits from Bill Zahren at Pressdog, who wrote a similarly complimentary post about this site.

That’s all it took, and suddenly I was on the map. Both of those posts by those two gentlemen were completely unsolicited and unexpected. But their readership was so strong that all it took was a recommendation by them to send those same readers my way. Long after I hang up my keyboard, I will be forever indebted to those two individuals for giving this site the jumpstart it needed. Without their unsolicited help, I may have gotten discouraged just a few months in and quit – just like so many others.

As I got more established in the IndyCar blogosphere, I tried to repay the favor that those two did for me. As new IndyCar blogs emerged, I would try to promote the ones that really caught my eye. Some did well, while others faded away fairly quickly. Sometimes a new blogger would e-mail me asking for advice, or just ask me to promote his or her new blog. If they looked good, I would – but there were a few that were just so awful, I would tell them things to improve before I would do it. Some took the advice, while some took offense. Oh, well…

Of course, all of the IndyCar blogs I’ve mentioned have all fallen by the wayside. Some of the crew from Planet IRL, broke off and formed More Front Wing, which I thought was a tremendous site that looked a lot more professional than my little site. But they went away in 2014, leaving Paul Dalbey to start Field of 33 on his own. Pressdog went away at the end of 2015, leaving just a handful of us to continue the IndyCar blogging frenzy that probably hit its peak from 2008 to 2011. Shout out to Mike Silver of The Pit Window and Patti Nolen of I Kissed the Bricks for keeping at it all these years.

Why am I rehashing the history of the shrinking IndyCar blogosphere? Because about a year and a half ago, I stumbled across another young gun who has already made his mark – not through writing, but with video – among IndyCar fans. It’s not that he really needs my help to get kick-started. He is already very well-established. Consider this a public service announcement for readers of this site. If you haven’t already started following him, you should.

Meet David Land, who has made his mark on You Tube. I first came across a David Land video in the offseason between the 2020 and 2021 seasons. He had a video about what we generally do in the offseason – speculating which driver was going to land where. I found his video to be professionally done, but with the homespun nature of an amateur (and I mean that in a good way). Most importantly, his videos turned out to be fairly accurate.

Throughout the 2021 IndyCar season, I kept seeing more and more David Land videos pop up in my You Tube feed. As they popped up, I found myself watching them more often. Land is based in Indianapolis and he is much more of a reporter than I am, but he also will opine about the way he sees things – like I tend to do. As with most people who offer their opinion, sometimes I’m in complete agreement with Land, while other times I’m not.

I will admit, it took me a while to get used to his style. At first, I found him a bit smug; but that didn’t take away from his message. Since then, I’ve met David Land a few times – the first being at the 2022 season-opener at St. Petersburg. I’ve since carried on conversations with him at Barber, Road America and a couple of weeks ago here in Nashville. I no longer see him as smug. In person, he is a nice, pleasant and humble young man…emphasis on the word young. I’m not sure how old he is, but my son is thirty-three and I’m willing to bet he is several years younger than my son.

Despite his relatively young age, David Land has carved out a name for himself. His You Tube channel has almost 80,000 subscribers and his most recent video posted as I write this had over 90,000 views just one day after it was uploaded. Those are numbers that would make any IndyCar blogger envious.

If you dig into his early videos, you’ll see that his You Tube channel started out with him playing racing video games. To me there’s nothing more boring than watching someone else play a video game. But within the last three to four years, his channel has become something to be taken seriously and his content is excellent. My only complaint is he doesn’t just focus on IndyCar. I get the impression that IndyCar is his true passion, but that he is trying to appeal to all race fans.

I’ve included a couple of recent samples of his work. One was after Race Two at Iowa, where he does a good job or reporting on the event and gives his own thoughts. The other shows him in more reporter mode as he discusses the Alex Palou-Chip Ganassi legal situation.

I’m obviously not trying to get you to quit reading my site, but if you are looking for more original IndyCar content that doesn’t simply regurgitate press-releases – give David Land’s You Tube channel a try. He is a good listen.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on August 17, 2022 at 4:02 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.