Sage Karam seeks another iRacing victory at Barber Motorsports Park

By Apr 3, 2020, 9:00 PM EDT
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INDYCAR’s iRacing Challenge continues this weekend as 29 cars and drivers will race at virtual Barber Motorsports Park for the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama Saturday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. ET.

The career achievements of the drivers entered in this weekend’s race include 14 total IndyCar championships, five Indy 500 victories, and 189 IndyCar race victories.

Oh, and a few NASCAR and Supercars championships as well with both Jimmie Johnson and Scott McLaughlin racing again this weekend.

ENTRY LIST: Who will be racing in round two

SPOTTER GUIDE: All 29 of this weekend’s paint schemes

Sage Karam will enter Saturday’s race as the most recent winner on the circuit, having won the inaugural race at virtual Watkins Glen last weekend.

An avid sim racer, Karam led 43 of 45 laps en route to his victory last Saturday. Karam is one of IndyCar’s most accomplished iRacing competitors, with 144 wins in 533 road course starts alone.

“As a part-time driver in the NTT IndyCar Series, I needed to be sharp with my reflexes and car control when I wasn’t on track,” Karam said. “I discovered iRacing quite a while back, and I truly believe it has helped me with my racing career. I was more nervous before the Glen race than at the Indy 500.”

Afterward, the Dreyer & Reinbold Racing driver said he was worn out after a “very mentally draining” race even despite his domination.

“In iRacing, we don’t have the fear factor of crashing or wrecking the car,” he said. “But you are racing on the edge with proper steering and pedal pressure as in an Indy car, and you are racing wheel-to-wheel in a competition. And all of the drivers are extremely competitive.

“The Barber track isn’t one of my favorites, but I’ll be ready on Saturday.”

Four new drivers will join Karam and company in this weekend’s event, including Scott Dixon, Jack Harvey, and Ed Carpenter, who is making his first non-oval start since Houston in 2013.

“It has been a long time since I competed in a road race, both the cars and iRacing have changed quite a lot,” Carpenter said. “I am a week late to the party, but hopefully, I will be up to speed enough to give the 21 car a good ride! I know my friends and family are excited to watch me, so no pressure!”

But the driver many fans are most excited to see is Robert Wickens, who will drive a race car of any kind for the first time since suffering a spinal cord injury in a crash at Pocono Raceway on Aug 18. 2018.

Wickens missed last weekend’s race when his equipment did not arrive on time, but is now all set up and ready to race.

“I’m just excited to drive something,” Wickens told reporters Friday. “Last night was the first time I’ve driven any form of race car since the accident at Pocono. Even though it’s virtual, it still felt pretty good.”

Fans will also have another avenue to watch the race on Saturday, as it will be broadcast live on NBCSN.

Leigh Diffey, Townsend Bell, and Paul Tracy will call the action as usual, and fans will be in for a few extra treats as Miss Alabama 2019 Tiara Pennington will sing the national anthem and NBA and Auburn University legend Charles Barkley will give the command to fire engines.

The second round of the IndyCar iRacing Challenge will take place at 2:30 p.m. ET Saturday on NBCSN and streaming here.

Roger Penske vows new downtown Detroit GP will be bigger than the Super Bowl for city

By Jun 1, 2023, 2:00 PM EDT
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DETROIT – He helped spearhead bringing the town a Super Bowl 17 years ago, but Roger Penske believes the reimagined Chevrolet Detroit GP is his greatest gift to the Motor City.

“It’s bigger than the Super Bowl from an impact within the city,” Penske told NBC Sports. “Maybe not with the sponsors and TV, but for the city of Detroit, it’s bigger than the Super Bowl.

“We’ve got to give back individually and collectively, and I think we as a company in Michigan and in Detroit, it’s something we know how to do. It shows we’re committed. Someone needs to take that flag and run it down through town. And that’s what we’re trying to do as a company. We’re trying to give back to the city.”

After 30 years of being run on Belle Isle, the race course has been moved to a new nine-turn, 1.7-mile downtown layout that will be the centerpiece of an event weekend that is designed to promote a festival and community atmosphere.

There will be concerts in the adjacent Hart Plaza. Local businesses from Detroit’s seven districts have been invited to hawk their wares to new clientele. Boys and Girls Clubs from the city have designed murals that will line the track’s walls with images of diversity, inclusion and what Detroit means through the eyes of youth.

And in the biggest show of altruism, more than half the circuit will be open for free admission. The track is building 4-foot viewing platforms that can hold 150 people for watching the long Jefferson Avenue straightaway and other sections of the track.

Detroit GP chairman Bud Denker, a longtime key lieutenant across Penske’s various companies, has overseen more than $20 million invested in infrastructure.

The race is essentially Penske’s love letter to the city where he made much of his fame as one of Detroit’s most famous automotive icons, both as a captain of industry with a global dealership network and as a racing magnate (who just won his record 19th Indy 500 with Josef Newgarden breaking through for his first victory on the Brickyard oval).

During six decades in racing, Penske, 86, also has run many racetracks (most notably Indianapolis Motor Speedway but also speedways in Michigan, California and Pennsylvania), and much of that expertise has been applied in Detroit.

“And then the ability for us to reach out to our sponsor base, and then the business community, which Bud is tied in with the key executives in the city of Detroit, bringing them all together,” Penske said. “It makes a big difference.

“The Super Bowl is really about the people that fly in for the Super Bowl. It’s a big corporate event, and the tickets are expensive. And the TV is obviously the best in the world. What we’ve done is taken that same playbook but made it important to everyone in Detroit. Anyone that wants to can come to the race for free, can stand on a platform or they can buy a ticket and sit in the grandstands or be in a suite. It’s really multiple choice, but it is giving it to the city of Detroit. I think it’s important when you think of these big cities across the country today that are having a lot of these issues.”

Denker said the Detroit Grand Prix is hoping for “an amazingly attended event” but is unsure of crowd estimates with much of the track offering free viewing. The race easily could handle a crowd of at least 50,000 daily (which is what the Movement Music Festival draws in Hart Plaza) and probably tens of thousands more in a sprawling track footprint along the city’s riverwalk.

Penske is hoping for a larger crowd than Belle Isle, which was limited to about 30,000 fans daily because of off-site parking and restricted fan access at a track that was located in a public park.

The downtown course will have some unique features, including a “split” pit lane on an all-new concrete (part of $15 million spent on resurfaced roads, new barriers and catchfencing … as well as 252 manhole covers that were welded down).

A $5 million, 80,000-square-foot hospitality chalet will be located adjacent to the paddock and pit area. The two-story structure, which was imported from the 16th hole of the Waste Management Open in Phoenix, will offer 70 chalets (up from 23 suites at Belle Isle last year). It was built by InProduction, the same company that installed the popular HyVee-branded grandstands and suites at Iowa Speedway last year.

Penske said the state, city, county and General Motors each owned parts of the track, and their cooperation was needed to move streetlights and in changing apexes of corners. Denker has spent the past 18 months meeting with city council members who represent Detroit’s seven districts, along with Mayor Mike Duggan. Penske said the local support could include an appearance by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Witmer.

Denker and Detroit GP  president Michael Montri were inspired to move the Detroit course downtown after attending the inaugural Music City Grand Prix in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We saw what an impact it made on that city in August of 2021 and we came back from there and said boy could it ever work to bring it downtown in Detroit again,” Denker said. “We’ve really involved the whole community of Detroit, and the idea of bringing our city together is what the mayor and city council and our governor are so excited about. The dream we have is now coming to fruition.

“When you see the infrastructure downtown and the bridges over the roads we’ve built and the graphics, and everything is centered around the Renaissance Center as your backdrop, it’s just amazing.”