For 16 months now, the crews have removed one Memorial Bridge and replaced it with another . . . and that is amazing.

On the racing side of things there's Lime Rock Park, a squiggle of racing asphalt in the northwest corner of Connecticut. Onceit was a strange land of Jim Haynes and people like Connie Lovejoy . . . now, well, who knows? Spending 25 years on the West Coast gets you cut from most lists and the invitations stop coming.

In any case, there is racing there this coming weekend.

Best of all, Greg Rickes offers you this column, and we are happy to share it with you:

There’s a sad irony that Froilan Gonzalez, the legendary “Pampas Bull”, and Jason Leffler should pass away within days of one another. Gonzalez survived perhaps the most dangerous era in racing,  Grand Prix and sports cars in the 1950s, to live a full life to age 90 -- while Leffler’s passing reminds us that even in this age of enlightened safety, motor racing is still a dangerous venture.

Leffler’s death from a sprint car accident at Bridgeport in New Jersey brought an uneasy focus on short tracks. The national media picked up on the story and cast a critical, if not necessarily fully-informed eye, on the nation’s local  speedways, finding them lax in comparison to superspeedways and major sanctioning bodies. Further there were more than a few critical comments, especially from Brad Keselowski:

http://www.timesunion.com/sports/article/Leffler-s-death-puts-spotlight-on-short-tracks-4601028.php

Leffler’s fatal sprint car crash comes just a couple of weeks after a similar, though less publicized, accident took the life of Josh Burton at  Bloomington Speedway in Indiana.

Trouble Down Under

Hal Wood passes along the news that Ford has announced it will stop building cars in Australia, leaving  GM rival Holden as the only car builder Down Under. What this will mean for the Australian V8 SuperCar series is a meaningful question. While the “Car of the Future” has opened up the series to entice Nissan and Mercedes, the Holden/Ford rivalry has been its mainstay, and now the question is whether Ford will import a suitable product to continue its racing heritage, and whether the Aussie audience will accept it as before.

Coming Up

After what seems like a very long interlude, the SCCA’s North Atlantic Road Racing Championship returns to Lime Rock Park this Saturday. In an effort to give the racers more track time, this will be a “double-feature” program, with complete racing programs in both the morning and afternoon.

The SCCA Club Racing program has been rolling through some lean times lately. The entry for the Memorial Day weekend at Watkins Glen never reached triple figures, and a number of other events have also reported lean turnouts. The SCCA Majors program is drawing larger entries, but does seem to have lost its original framework of prime track time for an entry limited to SCCA’s most popular classes. From what I can see, the Majors are now just very large National races.

In any case, there are some interesting entries for Lime Rock this weekend, and the total numbers may be informative as to the health of SCCA racing on the regional level in the Northeast.

On the big stage this weekend, the 24 Hours of Le Mans will hold the spotlight. There will be lots of interest in the GT ranks, where Viper returns to LeSarthe to go up against Ferrari, Aston Martin and Corvette. Hard to pick anybody but Audi for the top spot, although Toyota will do its best to keep things interesting.

IndyCar keeps its oval track focus going with a visit to Iowa Speedway for a Sunday afternoon show. It seems like the Andretti team is back in the groove, and Penske is getting its game sorted out, so the element of surprise from the early season may be more far-fetched from here on -- but then again, we said that at the beginning of the season, too.

Cheers,

Greg Rickes

These are stairs on the Kittery lift tower, in dawn's early light. (Bill Moore Photo)

It's fair to say that no engineering exercise in the world has ever been so throughly documented . . .civilians with cameras, videocams and notepads have covered it day and night; Archer-Western and the NH DOT have had folks covering it; but best of all, you can SEE it all happening at www.portsmouthwebcam.com.

Leaving us with one question: When will it be done, and how will we celebrate its completion?

Wonderful things have been planned for a spectacular opening day . . . but still, no one is talking. For this, we will have to wait.