Long Beach starts Mike Conway’s continental hopping Indy/sports car world tour

Although his St. Petersburg race was foiled by a miscommunication, look for Mike Conway and Ed Carpenter Racing to rebound this weekend in the Verizon IndyCar Series’ Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.

Conway enters the weekend in the No. 20 Fuzzy’s Vodka Chevrolet as one of seven past Long Beach winners, and additionally one of five drivers who scored their first career win on the historic streets in one of the 39 prior editions of the race.

His 2011 win for Andretti Autosport was something of a surprise, but it marked his territory as a future star to watch in IndyCar and also put his name in the record books for North America’s most prestigious street race.

“I had heard about the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach as I was growing up in England but I didn’t know the magnitude of the event,” Conway said in the team’s pre-race release. “I was on the top of the podium after my win and I looked down at the names in victory lane who had won there. And I said, ‘Bloody hell, there was a great list of drivers who have won at Long Beach.'”

A year ago, he was drafted into Long Beach as a last-minute third car for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, then promptly was quick in Friday practice and stuck the car in the Firestone Fast Six for qualifying on Saturday. That performance turned heads considering he had opted to end a full-time IndyCar career to focus solely on road and street courses, and quit ovals.

For Conway, this weekend starts a crazy stretch of action across continents as he balances his IndyCar commitments with ECR along with his duties in an LMP2 class ORECA 03 Nissan for Millennium Racing in the FIA World Endurance Championship over each of the next five weeks. Conway will share the No. 23 Millennium car with ex-F1 shoes Stefan Johansson and Shinji Nakano.

Conway races at Long Beach this weekend, then heads to his home country to race the FIA WEC curtain-raiser in Silverstone on April 20. April 27 is back to the ECR IndyCar at Barber Motorsports Park, in what will be his first natural terrain road course race in an IndyCar since Sonoma 2012 (all his 2013 and the first two 2014 races were on street courses). Then it’s back to the WEC for Spa on May 4, and then the five-week stretch concludes May 10 with the ECR IndyCar in the inaugural Grand Prix of Indianapolis.

In those five races, expect Conway to get at least one win, perhaps an additional podium finish or two and a heck of a lot of frequent flier miles. A Long Beach repeat of his 2011 triumph would not be a bad place to start.

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Editor’s note: Due to rain, Sunday’s final eliminations of the NHRA Carolina Nationals have been postponed to Monday morning at 10 a.m. ET. In the meantime, check out this rather unusual tale:

Remember the old Lays Potato Chips commercial from back in the 1980s that bragged “No one can eat just one”?

Well, ask NHRA Pro Stock driver Alex Laughlin and a few members of his team, and they’ll tell you they learned a very valuable lesson that there indeed IS a chip that you can only eat one of.

According to NHRA’s National Dragster, Laughlin and Elite Motorsports crew members Chase Freeman, Kelly Murphy and Brian Cunningham took part Friday night in the Paqui One Chip Challenge.

If you haven’t heard of the Challenge, Paqui Chips has produced a tortilla chip that the company boldly claims is the hottest chip ever made anywhere in the world. The secret is the “Carolina Reaper” pepper, considered the hottest chili pepper in the world, with a rating of 1.9 million Scoville units, according to PuckerButt Pepper Company.

How hot is 1.9 million Scoville units? Let’s put it this way: the Devil might even have a hard time taking this kind of heat. By comparison, a Jalapeno pepper only reaches 10,000 units on the Scoville rating.

So while they were enjoying some downtime Friday night after the first two rounds of qualifying for the NHRA Carolina Nationals at zMAX Dragway in Concord, North Carolina (suburban Charlotte), Laughlin and Co. paid $30 for one chip – you read that right, $30 for one chip, it’s THAT hot – and thought they could take the heat.

They thought wrong.

“This is the hottest chip in the world,” Laughlin said on an Instagram post that documented the entire experience, adding a warning, “What to expect: Mouth on fire, short-term loss of speech, impaired vision from tears, extreme profanity — or death.”

View this post on Instagram

Never. Ever. Again.

A post shared by Alex Laughlin (@alexlaughlin40) on Oct 12, 2019 at 7:13am PDT

Laughlin’s post also includes several reader comments that Laughlin and his crew should have had milk on hand instead of water to try and cool things down because milk has a natural antidote to cool your mouth down after eating hot food.

Sunday morning, with his mouth and throat still a bit sore, Laughlin recalled the red-hot episode to National Dragster’s Kevin McKenna:

“Never again. Never. Ever. Ever,” Laughlin told McKenna. “It was definitely not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

“One of our guys showed me a You Tube video and it looked like it wasn’t going to be too bad. I like spicy food and it’s usually never a problem. I’ve been to those places with hot wings where you have to sign a waiver before you eat them and that’s never been a problem.

“But this? This is on a whole different level. I thought it might last ten minutes. Fourteen hours later, I was still in bad shape. I woke up at 3 a.m. and Googled “internal bleeding.” I seriously thought I was going to die. We all did.”

So if the heat from the chip was off the hotness Richter scale, where did the stunt rank on Laughlin’s own personal Richter scale?

I’ve done some dumb things, but this is right up there.

“Well, I really didn’t think it would be that bad,” Laughlin told McKenna with a shrug. “I mean, it’s just one tortilla chip. Like I said, I can usually eat stuff that other people won’t eat, but I had no idea what I was in for.

“I’ve done some dumb things, but this is right up there.”

If you’re up for another challenge in the future that involves eating hot food, Alex, here’s a suggestion: Even though it’s a few years old now, maybe you should try the Ice Bucket Challenge (but fill it with milk) to cool down quick. Just a thought.

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