'08 is Live!

Good day, race fans. Or, good evening, I guess, as I write this. Anyway, Happy New Year to one and all. Here's hoping that the new year will be as entertaining as last year was, racingwise, though I couldn't in my wildest dreams hope that anything as delightful as The War at Watkins (i.e. Kanaan vs. The Hornish Family) will happen this year.

I just wanted to weigh in and say that I actually just experienced one of my favorite racing moments of all of 2007 last week: the black flag period during the Formula Continental race at the SCCA Runoffs. Usually black flag periods (when all cars have to come into the pits for track cleanup, in SCCA parlance, not what Milka Duno gets around lap 40 of every IRL race she enters) are deathly boring, but not so much this time around. In the able hands of Mike Johnson and Chris Neville, Speed's pit reporters for half of the Runoffs races, we got a clinic of what on-the-scene race reporting can be. Working with each other, and with one fleet footed camera man, we got to see Johnson and Neville have a quick word with each of the drivers in the top-10 in the space of about two or three minutes. It was awesome watching the two of them leap frog each other, one guy running behind the camera man while the other talked with a driver on camera, then the camera man running down to the next car. Making the whole thing even better was the fact that Johnson and Neville knew exactly what was going on with each driver in the race (or, at least the guys feeding them info through their headsets did), and all of them were asked interesting and pertinent questions regarding tactics to that point or what we could expect after the restart. It was fascinating to watch the whole thing, leaving me wondering how this has only shown up at an "amateur" event, and why we haven't seen anything similar on a starting grid in any other form of motorsport. The tape of the FC race should be required watching for anybody involved with TV production for any series in North America.

That's all for now. The Daytona 24 is in 24 days!