Oilpressure

By Susan Phillips

The past several years, George and I have traveled far and wide going to INDYCAR races around the country. From Pennsylvania to Florida, from Texas to Wisconsin and Indiana to California; we have criss-crossed the country covering INDYCAR races for our website.

Over the years, we have built friendships with many people in the INDYCAR media center, and even a few people associated with teams.

That’s why it is almost surreal to have them all coming to our town. All we did this morning was wake up at home, do a few household chores and drive across town—and a little bit past—and here we are with all of people we are used to seeing and going to dinner with in Indianapolis, Road America, Barber, etc.

It’s funny that many them have been asking us for dinner recommendations for this weekend. I hate to tell them but we never, ever go out. A perfect example is when we came out here last night to pick up our media credentials and check out where we are sitting, we lived it up by stopping at a Whataburger just a few miles from the track. The only time we eat out is when we travel to races. We were thrilled to go there, but I don’t think our friends were looking to us to suggest Whataburger.

During qualifying, we ran into some old friends that we always enjoy visiting with. As it turned out, we spent all of qualifying chatting with them on pit lane. Tonight, we are breaking tradition and eating dinner with another old friend that usually joins us for dinner at Dawson’s in Indianapolis.

I’m not trying to brag about how many people we know. After doing this for sixteen and a half years, it would be hard to not make friends at all the races we go to. That’s one of the big reasons we keep going to races after all this time—that and the fact that George can never get enough of visiting race tracks.

But in my eyes, it’s the friends we have made that keeps bringing us back. And why we plan to keep coming to race tracks as long as we are able—so long as they let us.

This entry was posted on August 30, 2025 at 3:12 pm 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.