Team Penske got another championship and it has a chance at another next week. NASCAR's fairy tale fell short. The FIA World Endurance Championship and MotoGP both had red flags due to rain but half a world apart. There was an unfathomable winner in Moto3! Rob Huff did not win in Macau. Prayers go out to Sophia Flörsch after her terrible accident. The World Rally Championship's three-way title fight was anti-climatic. Thanksgiving is upon us. Here is a run down of what got me thinking.
Picking the Americans for Race of Champions
We are at the end of the motorsports season. There are a few championships still going and a few starting but for the most part we are at the end and looking for some time off. With the end of the season comes traditional offseason events and one of those is the Race of Champions.
The Race of Champions has not taken over the world and arguably it has lost some luster over the last ten to 15 years. For starters, we have less of an offseason. It wasn't long ago that at this point of the year the Formula One season had been over for a month and we were still four months until the opening round of the following season. The IndyCar season would be over. NASCAR would be the one major series wrapping up. There was no world championship for sports cars and the fragmented sports car series of the world had all be finished for a month.
There was a time when the Race of Champions fell at the right point in the offseason. It was early December. We had a break and the time had come for a hit of motorsports action. What better bump to get then a gathering of the best drivers from around the world from a handful of different disciplines? It was an early Christmas present.
The world has changed. There is no break. Formula One keeps going. NASCAR is oversaturated. The FIA World Endurance Championship has changed its calendar to run over the winter months. IndyCar has been over but that is really it when it comes to the top series. Drivers don't have as much time to recharge the batteries and have enough energy for this all-star competition. The big names do not come out like they once did.
Race of Champions has tried to adapt with the times. The event moved from the start of December to the middle of January. It is still a part of the year where we are starved of motorsports and it gives Formula One drivers a break before competing but it still trying to fit in to a growing clutter on the calendar.
It is still here and I continue to look forward to it and the upcoming edition of Race of Champions will be held in Mexico, at Foro Sol, the baseball stadium inside Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. Mexico has already announced four competitors. Benito Guerra, the 2012 Production World Rally Championship champion returns for the first time since 2012. Four-time Grand-Am champion and three-time overall 24 Hours of Daytona winner Memo Rojas will be back for his second consecutive Race of Champions. The Mexican drivers making their Race of Champions debut will be the reigning Indy Lights champion and IndyCar rookie Patricio O'Ward and the 2016 NASCAR Grand National Series champion and still free agent Daniel Suárez.
Joining the four Mexican drivers will be the defending Champion of Champions winner David Coulthard and the 2015 Champion of Champions and the seven-time Nations' Cup winner, the most successful driver in the history of Race of Champions, Sebastian Vettel.
There will be plenty of other world-class drivers announced in the coming days and months to join those six competitors but I want to focus on the United States.
The United States has won the Nations' Cup once, in 2002, when Colin Edwards went undefeated and carried the United States to victory with Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon. Travis Pastrana almost single-handily won the Nations' Cup in 2006 but lost to Heikki Kovalainen twice in the final as Kovalainen and Marcus Grönholm won it for Finland. Pastrana and Tanner Foust got the United States to the semifinals in 2009 but lost to the German team of Vettel and Michael Schumacher. In 2017, on home soil, the United States had power-in-numbers and was guaranteed to compete in the finals when the NASCAR duo of Kyle and Kurt Busch took on IndyCar's Alexander Rossi and Ryan Hunter-Reay in a semifinal. The Busch brothers advanced but lost to Vettel, who single-handily won it for Germany after Pascal Wehrlein was injured the day before.
While the United States has had moderate Nations' Cup success, no American driver has ever won the Champion of Champions competition. Only once has an American made it to the semifinals and that was Carl Edwards in 2008.
There are a lot of great drivers in the world but with the quantity of American drivers there is no reason why the United States has yet to produce a Champion of Champions winner.
Frankly, many United States teams at the Race of Champions have been duds. The first American team in 2000 had Danny Sullivan, who had been retired for five years, and off-road racer Rod Millen alongside Colin Edwards. One year after winning the Nations' Cup, the United States had Boris Said, Casey Mears and Pastrana defend the title. In 2004, Mears was a late substitute for an ill Jeff Gordon. In 2006, Pastrana had to compete on his own because Jimmie Johnson broke his arm fooling around on a golf cart and Scott Speed hurt himself doing who knows what.
Tanner Foust represented the United States three times and worst of all Foust and Brian Deegan were the representatives in 2011. Twice has the United States not even had a team but fielded one participant in an Americas team. Ryan Hunter-Reay did it in 2012 with Guerra and Hunter-Reay did it in 2015 with José María López. There was an Americas team in 2014 with López and Robby Gordon but there was also a United States team in that competition made up of Hunter-Reay and Kurt Busch.
With 2019 approaching there is no reason why the United States should not only have its own team but a team that should be competing for the Nations' Cup and have two competitors capable of winning Champion of Champions.
Time is up when it comes to sitting idle and letting a D-Team represented the United States. It is time somebody stepped up and made sure the best two American drivers are at Race of Champions... and that is where I come in, the self-appointed general manager for the United States Race of Champions team.
No one else is stepping up to do it. What is more American than taking on a task nobody has thought needed a leader?
The last two editions of Race of Champions have been promising. On home soil, the United States got the necessary bump. Sure, it had three of four teams in a group in the Nations' Cup and the top two advance and those two teams met in a semifinal but beyond that Pastrana won his Champions of Champions group after defeating Hélio Castroneves, Vettel and Alexander Rossi. Kyle Busch advanced from his group over Tony Kanaan and James Hinchcliffe. Unfortunately, Pastrana and Busch were both eliminated in the quarterfinals without winning a race in the best-of-three format.
Last year, Hunter-Reay returned for his fifth consecutive Race of Champions appearance and Josef Newgarden joined him in Saudi Arabia. Things did not go well in the Nations Cup. The United States could not get out of the group ahead of Germany's René Rast and Timo Bernhard and the Latin America team of Juan Pablo Montoya and Hélio Castroneves. Hunter-Reay went 0-3 while Newgarden went 2-1 with victories over Castroneves and Rojas.
In the Champion of Champions competition, Hunter-Reay got out of his group with victories over Castroneves and Rojas while Newgarden defeated both Saudi Arabian drivers on their home soil. The quarterfinals were not so kind. Coulthard handily knocked out Hunter-Reay while Newgarden ended up in the barrier after two corners in his race against World Rallycross champion Johan Kristoffersson.
The United States is progressing in the right direction in the Race of Champions but we have to keep it going in this direction.
A bar has to be set high. The difficult thing is picking out only two drivers to represent a country that has plenty of top drivers across NASCAR, IndyCar and sports cars. The United States has plenty of drivers that the country could probably field 15 teams of two and each one appear better than the one before it. How do we decide who should go?
It is not as simple as picking a champion or a race winner. The Race of Champions is a multi-discipline event. A driver needs to be able to drive the nimble ROC car, which is a buggy, a KTM X-Bow, something as heavy and clunky as the knockoff Euro version of a stock car. A driver has got to be flexible and has to be able to drive a bad car with little preparation.
That sounds like a sports car driver but there is a trend in Race of Champions and that is the Champion of Champions competition has ruled by single-seater drivers. Since the Race of Champions has moved to the confined crossover/stadium course in 2004, there have been 13 competitions. While the combination of Mattias Ekström and Sébastien Loeb won five of six Champion of Champions from 2004-09, six of the last seven winners were drivers from single-seater series.
The lone exception is Sébastien Ogier in 2011. Since 2010, Filipe Albuquerque took a shock victory in 2010 in Düsseldorf and at that time the Portuguese driver was starting his transition to sports cars and was running the Italian GT Championship but at that time he was fresh off success in Formula Renault 3.5 and A1GP. The last five Champion of Champions winners have been Romain Grosjean, David Coulthard, Sebastian Vettel, Juan Pablo Montoya and Coulthard.
With that said, tin-top experience is duly noted. The dominance of Ekström and Loeb was not that long ago and since 2010, the losing finalists have been Loeb, Tom Kristensen, Kristensen, Pascal Wehrlein, Kristensen, Kristensen and Petter Solberg.
The team preferably should be balanced. There should be one driver from a single-seater series and one driver from a tin-top series. So we haven't narrowed it down at all but we should look at what the United States has done in recent years that has achieved its moderate success.
Newgarden went 4-3 last year in Race of Champions, which isn't a great record and slightly misleading when you take into consideration two of those victories were local Saudi Arabian drivers whom he should have defeated. I said after last year's Nations' Cup that if I was GM of the United States team I would bring Hunter-Reay into my office, shake his hand and thank him for his service.
Hunter-Reay has not been great in Race of Champions. Here are his records over the five competitions: 2-4, 5-2, 3-3, 2-5 and 2-5. I think we know who Hunter-Reay is and he put in five tours of duty. It is time for someone else to carry the flag.
Alexander Rossi's 2017 Race of Champions is a bit wishy-washy. Rossi went 0-3 in his Champion of Champions group with losses to Pastrana, Castroneves and Vettel. However, he went 3-2 in the Nations' Cup. His Nations' Cup group is a bit misleading because that was the group with three American teams and a Canadian team and Rossi lost to Stefan Rzadzinski. His second loss was to Kurt Busch when it was pretty clear Busch jumped the start and Busch was not penalized for it. So, who has Rossi beat? He falls in the same boat as Newgarden.
Kyle Busch did well in 2017 but his brother Kurt might have been slightly better. Kyle went 2-1 in his Champion of Champions group but unfortunately lost 2-0 to Coulthard in the quarterfinals. Kurt didn't get out of his group and went 1-2 but Kurt went 2-1 in the Nations' Cup group and won both races to get to the final before a losing to Vettel in the final. Kurt also ran in 2014 but that was opposite to 2017. Kurt struggled in the Nations' Cup going for 1-2 and the United States did not advance but he went 3-0 in his Champion of Champions group but in a group that featured Petter Solberg, Susie Wolff and Barbadian driver Rhett Watson and he lost to Jamie Whincup in the quarterfinals.
Using recent results, there isn't a standout, no doubt selection. There are a few drivers that would be encouraging selections but none are surefire picks.
What about outside the bubble? We looked at five drivers, what about the hundred-plus American drivers? There is one unexplored territory when it comes to the United States in the Race of Champions is sports cars. There hasn't really been a top American sports car driver to run Race of Champions and when you go back to the array of cars that one has to drive in Race of Champions and lack of preparation, why isn't a sports car driver representing the United States? Sports car drivers have to jump into crazy situations and sometimes into a car that has been on track for six hours and is entirely different then when that driver was last behind the wheel.
Sports cars in general is a diverse discipline. You have prototypes, GTE, GT3 and even touring cars have sports car-based drivers competing. Those are at least three different disciplines that we throw under one category and the United States have drivers that have succeeded in all of them.
Patrick Long won in the Porsche RS Spyder and has been consistently winning in Porsche's GT program. On top of that, Long has won a few stock car races.
Joey Hand has won the 24 Hours of Daytona overall and in the top GT category and he won the GTE-Pro category at Le Mans. Hand spent three years in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters and while he didn't win a race Hand did well after a change of scenery.
Colin Braun has won races in Grand-Am while a teenager in a Daytona Prototype. Braun won the Prototype Challenge championship twice. This year, Braun and Jon Bennett put up a strong fight in a disadvantaged LMP2 car against the DPi stronghold of Cadillac in IMSA's Prototype class and they were runner-ups in the championship. Oh, and not only has Braun done that but he was the youngest driver to stand on a class podium at Le Mans when he finished second in GT2 in 2007 with Tracy Krohn and Nic Jönsson when 18 years old and he won in NASCAR's Truck series and he ran well in NASCAR's second division while also having some rallycross experience. And Braun has been linked to an IndyCar ride over the last six months.
Through all this I have not mentioned Jordan Taylor, who is a IMSA Prototype champion, had won a championship in Daytona Prototype prior to that, won in GTE-Pro at Le Mans with Corvette and he did well in Grand-Am's GT championship with Bill Lester. I have also not mentioned Andy Lally, who has won many times in GT competition but was also the NASCAR Cup rookie of the year in 2011 and he has shown in recent years he can take a team that is in the back half of the grid in NASCAR's second division and turn it into a top ten finisher and even top five contender on a road course.
I kind of want to give a sports car guy a shot and if there is one that fits right now it is Colin Braun. He has found success in pretty much every style of racecar he has driven. He might be the secret weapon for the United States. When it comes to single-seater options, it basically comes down to whether you think Newgarden's track record of beating two Saudi Arabian drivers, Castroneves and Rojas is more impressive than Rossi's track record of being swept in a group and losing to a driver who never made it higher than Indy Lights but got in position to advance to the final of Nations' Cup and lost a semifinal race where his opponent clearly jumped the start. If we were to use this year as a tiebreaker then Rossi is the choice.
There is one other name I will throw out there and it has to do with a notable trend in Race of Champions. In recent years, the top drivers in the competition have been older and quasi-retired. I cannot explain it.
The last six Races of Champions have had at least one Champion of Champions finalist be over the age of 40. The last two years have had both Champion of Champions finalists be over the age of 40 and in both editions three of the four semifinalists have been over 40 and it is spreading over to the Nations' Cup. Montoya and Castroneves made the finals last year. Both drivers are over 40. Two editions prior to that the English team of 48-year-old Jason Plato and 41-year-old Andy Priaulx won the Nations' Cup and in 2014 the 47-year-old Tom Kristensen and 40-year-old Petter Solberg won the Nations' Cup as Team Nordic over the United Kingdom pairing of Susie Wolff and 43-year-old David Coulthard.
Not only are these driver older and somewhat retired but some had unfulfilled careers. Coulthard had 13 grand prix victories but he never really challenged for the world championship. Coulthard's only real championship was the 1989 Formula Ford 1600 title. Castroneves might have won 30 IndyCar races, including three Indianapolis 500s but he never won a championship. He was more known for losing championships. Solberg is living off the World Rally Championship he won in 2003. Yes, he has won the World Rallycross title twice... but that is rallycross.
Coulthard, Castroneves and Solberg all had respectable careers but they are definitely frustrating careers when you think about them.
So... who is the American equivalent? What 40-plus, somewhat retired American driver that had a respectable career, won a fair amount and won big races but never won the big championship but won other small championships early in a career is out there and fits these qualifications?
Dale Earnhardt, Jr.
Think about it! Earnhardt, Jr. won 26 Cup races, not a small total, more than champions Terry Labonte, Bobby Labonte and Benny Parsons, and he won the Daytona 500 twice. However, Earnhardt, Jr. didn't really meet the expectations and I am not talking about those of the manically fans who expected him to be his father but of the reasonable fan who saw him win back-to-back Grand National Series titles and thought, "Yeah, he could win a Cup title." Earnhardt, Jr. only came close to a championship once or twice.
In 2003, he finished third in the Cup championship but Matt Kenseth dominated that year and Earnhardt, Jr. spent most of the year in second only to lose a lot of ground late and have Jimmie Johnson surpass him in the final race. In 2004, Earnhardt, Jr. had a slim shot at the title in the finale but he needed a lot of events to go in his favor. That was it for his Cup title challenges. For the final 13 years of his career he was never in the discussion for a title.
Earnhardt, Jr. might just win the Race of Champions. There are plenty of people still buzzed off his cameo appearance in NASCAR's second division at Richmond in September where he finished fourth after not doing any racing for ten months. There is probably a sizable crowd that thinks he still has it and is bound to announce a comeback to full-time driving at any moment. That isn't happening but a one-off in an exhibition event? It isn't that crazy.
I don't think Earnhardt, Jr.'s lack of racing would hurt him. Do you think Coulthard does any serious racing between Race of Champions? No! And why couldn't Dale Earnhardt, Jr. just step into a KTM X-Bow and win the damn thing? Coulthard can do it and he is on television just as much as Earnhardt, Jr.
It would be a massive coup for Race of Champions it got Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Race of Champions is not going to get Dale Earnhardt, Jr. I don't think he would be even a slight bit interested if the organizers called him.
With the dream pick not even interested, let's focus on putting the best two drivers out there and I think Colin Braun and Alexander Rossi are the two drivers for the job. If this were reality we would see how those two would do and then re-group and look toward the next competition. We can't do that and we are at the mercy of some anonymous driver picker to represent the United States.
Champions From the Weekend
Joey Logano won the NASCAR Cup Series championship with his victory at Homestead.
Tyler Reddick won the NASCAR Grand National Series championship after winning the finale at Homestead, his second victory of the season.
Brett Moffitt won the NASCAR Truck Series championship after winning the finale at Homestead, his sixth victory of the season.
Sébastien Ogier won his sixth consecutive World Rally Championship Drivers' championship after finishing sixth in Rally Australia.
Gabriele Tarquini won the World Touring Car Cup championship after finishes of fourth, a retirement and tenth at Macau.
Winners From the Weekend
You know about Joey Logano, Tyler Reddick and Brett Moffitt but did you know...
Andrea Dovizioso won MotoGP's Valencian Community Grand Prix, his fourth victory of the season. Miguel Oliveira won the Moto2 race, his third victory of the season. Can Öncu won the Moto3 race on his Moto3 debut! The 15-year-old Turkish rider was the 2018 Red bull MotoGP Rookies Cup champion.
The #7 Toyota of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and José María López won the 6 Hours of Shanghai. The #38 Jackie Chan DC Racing Oreca of Ho-Pin Tung, Gabriel Aubry and Stéphane Richelmi won in LMP2, their third victory of the season. The #95 Aston Martin of Nicki Thiim and Marco Sørensen won in GTE-Pro. The #77 Dempsey-Proton Racing Porsche of Matt Campbell, Christian Ried and Julien Andlauder won in GTE-Am, their third victory of the season.
Jari-Matti Latvala won Rally Australia
Dan Ticktum won the Macau Grand Prix for the second consecutive year.
Jean-Karl Vernay, Frédéric Vervisch and Esteban Guerrieri won the World Touring Car Cup races from Macau.
BMW's Augusto Farfus won the FIA GT World Cup from Macau.
Coming Up This Weekend
The Formula One finale from Abu Dhabi.
Supercars finale from Newcastle.
The Asian Le Mans Series season opener from Shanghai.
Covering All Motorsports. From Indianapolis to Le Mans, Daytona to Monaco.
