Carpenter tests at Sonoma, with Hunter-Reay assist - MotorSportsTalk

For the second straight year, Ed Carpenter enters the new IndyCar season having had all winter to enjoy being the last race winner of the previous season.

Now, the Fontana winner was back on track for the first time this year, as part of a private testing session at Sonoma Raceway in California.

Carpenter and the Ed Carpenter Racing team opted to skip last week’s test at Sebring to concentrate on the flowing Sonoma road course, which unlike Sebring, actually has a date on the 2013 IZOD IndyCar Series calendar.

“Anytime there are people testing somewhere and you’re not there you feel like you’re missing something, but we’ll get our turn this week and we’re excited about that,” Carpenter said.

It wasn’t just Carpenter who had a shot at the team’s No. 20 Fuzzy’s Vodka Dallara-Chevrolet. Ryan Hunter-Reay, the defending IndyCar champion, had a few laps in the car on Wednesday.

An ECR team spokesman confirmed Hunter-Reay was helping Team Chevy with some developments, as part of a collaborative effort between ECR, Andretti Autosport and Team Chevy. A similar occurrence came in Fontana last December, when Marco Andretti ran the car.

Carpenter struggled in road and street course qualifying a year ago, starting from 20^th or worse in the first nine street and road course races. But at Baltimore, the tenth and last of the year, Carpenter and the team adeptly nailed a good enough time in the preliminary round of qualifying to advance into the second round as others hit issues. The eighth place spot on the grid is the best of his career on such a circuit.

“We felt we were getting better with our street circuit setups and Baltimore was a good qualifying performance for us,” he said. “So getting back on the road course at Sonoma will help us work on that process. It will feel great to be back in the race car again.”

Besides Carpenter, entries from Panther and DRR (JR Hildebrand, Oriol Servia), Dragon Racing (Sebastians Bourdais and Saavedra), KV Racing Technology (Tony Kanaan, Simona de Silvestro) and Sam Schmidt’s two cars (Tristan Vautier in No. 55 Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Dallara-Honda, Simon Pagenaud in No. 77 Schmidt Hamilton Motorsports Dallara-Honda) tested Wednesday.

Media and fan attention focused on a controversial run-in between Haiden Deegan and his Monster Energy Yamaha Star Racing teammate Jordon Smith during Round 10 of the Monster Energy Supercross race at Detroit, after which the 250 East points’ Hunter Lawrence defends the young rider in the postrace news conference.

Deegan took the early lead in Heat 1 of the round, but the mood swiftly changed when he became embroiled in a spirited battle with teammate Smith.

On Lap 3, Smith caught Deegan with a fast pass through the whoops. Smith briefly held the lead heading into a bowl turn but Deegan had the inside line and threw a block pass. In the next few turns, the action heated up until Smith eventually ran into the back of Deegan’s Yamaha and crashed.

One of the highlights of the battle seemed to include a moment when Deegan waited on Smith in order to throw a second block pass, adding fuel to the controversy.

After his initial crash, Smith fell to seventh on the next lap. He would crash twice more during the event, ultimately finishing four laps off the pace in 20th.

The topic was inevitably part of the postrace news conference.

“It was good racing; it was fun,” Deegan said at about the 27-minute mark in the video above. “I just had some fun doing it.”

Smith had more trouble in the Last Chance Qualifier. He stalled his bike in heavy traffic, worked his way into a battle for fourth with the checkers in sight, but crashed a few yards shy of the finish line and was credited with seventh. Smith earned zero points and fell to sixth in the standings.

Lawrence defends Deegan — *Jordon Smith failed to make the Detroit Supercross Main and fell to sixth in the points. – Feld Motor Sports*

“I think he’s like fifth in points,” Deegan said. “He’s a little out of it. Beside that it was good, I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Deegan jokingly deflected an earlier question with the response that he wasn’t paying attention during the incident.

“He’s my teammate, but he’s a veteran, he’s been in this sport for a while,” Deegan said. “I was up there just battling. I want to win as much as everybody else. It doesn’t matter if it’s a heat race or a main; I just want to win. I was just trying to push that.”

As Deegan and Smith battled, Jeremy Martin took the lead. Deegan finished second in the heat and backed up his performance with a solid third-place showing in the main, which was his second podium finish in a short six-race career. Deegan’s first podium was earned at Daytona, just two rounds ago.

But as Deegan struggled to find something meaningful to say, unsurprisingly for a 17-year-old rider who was not scheduled to run the full 250 schedule this year, it was the championship leader Lawrence who came to his defense.

“I just want to point something out, which kind of amazes me,” Lawrence said during the conference. “So many of the people on social media, where everyone puts their expertise in, are saying the racing back in the ’80s, the early 90s, when me were men. They’re always talking about how gnarly it was and then anytime a block pass or something happens now, everyone cries about it.

“That’s just a little bit interesting. Pick one. You want the gnarly block passes from 10 years ago and then you get it, everyone makes a big song and dance about it.”

Pressed further, Lawrence defended not only the pass but the decision-making process that gets employed lap after lap in a Supercross race.

“It’s easy to point the finger,” Lawrence said. “We’re out there making decisions in a split millisecond. People have all month to pay their phone bill and they still can’t do that on time.

“We’re making decisions at such a fast reaction [time with] adrenaline. … I’m not just saying it for me or Haiden. I speak for all the guys. No one is perfect and we’re under a microscope out there. The media is really quick to point a finger when someone makes a mistake.”

The media is required to hold athletes accountable for their actions. They are also required to tell the complete story.

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