A From the Marbles first! We're attempting the chat triple this year, and first up is the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Monaco Sunday at 7:45 AM ET. Grab your coffee and join us as we gaze in envy at the people sunbathing on the multi-million dollar yachts while watching the race.
Saturday
Warped Wednesday: Ryan Newman punished for Talladega comments
Welcome to Warped Wednesday. On this, we'll put out the rush to judgment mat, go a little too far and have a little fun. Will it be funny? Sometimes. Will it be crazy and largely unbelievable? Probably. Will not everyone get it? Definitely.
Ryan Newman has been fined $25,000 for his comments criticizing NASCAR?s decision to race late into the afternoon and evening at Talladega on Sunday.
Newman?s comments were out of frustration after he was involved in a crash that saw Kurt Busch?s car land on top of his.
"They can build safer race cars, they can build safer walls, but they can't get their heads out of their asses far enough to keep them on the race track, and that's pretty disappointing," he said after exiting the infield care center. "I wanted to make sure I get that point across, and y'all can figure out who 'they' is.?
NASCAR certainly figured out who the ?they? was in Newman?s comments, and he was fined the same amount that Denny Hamlin was after he made his comments about the racing at Phoenix in the second Sprint Cup race of the season.
In a statement exclusive to Warped Wednesday, NASCAR said that the decision to fine Newman was an easy one because he slammed the people responsible for NASCAR?s race operations and those that design the heralded and incredible Generation-6 car.
?Questioning the integrity of the sport is something that we don?t take lightly,? the statement said. ?While denigrating a fine piece of miraculous racing equipment is one thing, it?s not much better to question the judgment of the people who work to put on a safe and entertaining race for both fans and drivers. We acknowledge that Newman?s statements were made in a heated moment after a crash, however other leagues fine its participants for criticizing judgment calls.?
?In the light of our fine of Denny Hamlin, it allows us to show the fans that we?re consistent and don?t draw a fine line between criticism of machines and humans. Especially when those humans design said incredible sixth-generation cars like those that crashed on Sunday at Talladega.?
Kurt Busch straps in for some laps at Indianapolis in an IndyCar
Wednesday morning, Kurt Busch got into Ryan Hunter-Reay's car at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to run some laps. Will we see Kurt in the Indianapolis 500 anytime soon? He's in a car for Andretti Autosport, which fields Chevrolets, so manufacturer conflicts won't be an issue if he decides to do the double.
Other popular content on Yahoo! Sports:
? Jerry "The King" Lawler returning to the ring following heart attack
? Warriors' Klay Thompson grabs spotlight, lights up Spurs
? LeBron James, Heat frustrate Bulls in historic Game 2 blowout
? Former Notre Dame fullback Asaph Schwapp dies at age 26
Mario Andretti Michael Andretti Keith Andrews Elio de Angelis
Alonso heads times but Hamilton has fastest sectors | 2013 Canadian Grand Prix Friday practice analysis
Fernando Alonso produced the quickest individual lap time but Lewis Hamilton had the fastest three combined sectors during practice in Canada.
Source: http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2013/06/07/2013-canadian-grand-prix-friday-practice-analysis/
Friday
Into the Crystal Ball? The Sambadrome Edition
Welcome to May! Before we hit the famed Brickyard, there is one more stop to make: The Streets of Sao Paulo Brazil. Without a doubt, this track is a favorite of fans and drivers alike. Half of the circuit consists … Continue reading 
Source: http://anotherindycarblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/into-the-crystal-ball-the-sambadrome-edition-2/
Thursday
Some news from around the F1 world
While the F1 world is unusually calm, apart from the clucking about tyre testing. The teams have been rushing to get everything ready for the flyaway to Canada and the circus is now getting together again in Montreal. In the meantime Robert Kubica is celebrating his first major success in rallying, having won the WRC2 […]
Source: http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/some-news-from-around-the-f1-world/
Ernesto Brambilla Vittorio Brambilla Toni Branca Gianfranco Brancatelli
Denny Hamlin on pole for Coca-Cola 600
Denny Hamlin knocked Kurt Busch off the provisional pole and will lead the field to green in Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
It was looking like it'd be Busch's third straight pole after he won the pole at Darlington and for the All-Star Race on Saturday, but Hamlin bested Busch and broke Busch's then-new track record with a lap of 195.624 MPH.
The 600 will be Hamlin's second points race since returning from a back injury that sidelined him for five races.
Hamlin's teammate Matt Kenseth starts third, Mark Martin is fourth and Clint Bowyer starts fifth, meaning that Toyotas have four of the top five spots. Kyle Busch, the driver of the other Joe Gibbs Racing car, was no slacker himself, qualifying eighth. .
Jimmie Johnson, winner of the All-Star Race, starts 12th. Mike Bliss was the only driver to fail to qualify.
Related coverage on Yahoo! Sports:
? Was it too soon for Dale Jarrett to make NASCAR's Hall of Fame?
? Happy Hour: NASCAR fans offer their suggestions for All-Star Race
? Jimmie Johnson excels at going the distance
Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nascar-from-the-marbles/denny-hamlin-pole-coca-cola-600-003236238.html
Carl Edwards to start first in Sprint All-Star Race
Carl Edwards will start first in Saturday night's Sprint All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
All-Star qualifying is always different than a standard best of two laps run for a points race with each driver's run including three laps and a four tire pit stop. This year, NASCAR added a new wrinkle (that was previously an old one) and eliminated the pit road speed limit. That meant that many drivers were flying off the turns 3 and 4 banking onto pit road at over 150 MPH. That included Edwards, who had the second best lap one time and the best time entering the pits on his second lap.
Edwards won the race in 2011.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. starts second and Kurt Busch will start third. 19 drivers are already qualified for the All-Star Race and three will move on from the Sprint Showdown on Saturday night.
In the Showdown, Martin Truex Jr. is on the pole and Jamie McMurray will start second.
The Davids take down the Goliaths at Talladega; controversy, of course, rides shotgun
TALLADEGA, Ala. - At Talladega, controversy comes at you like a pinwheeling car in The Big One: you don't know when it will happen, and you don't know what direction it will come from, but you know it's coming. Every single year.
The Aaron's 499 on Sunday took seven hours and five minutes, about half of which was spent in a red-flag rain delay. And, as always happens at Talladega, race-altering possibilities that were visible at the green flag ? rainfall, catastrophic wrecks, the threat of darkness ? all came into play, seasoned with a light dusting of a restart controversy.
First things first, however: this race had the most improbable 1-2 finishers in years, if not decades. Winner David Ragan and second-place finisher David Gilliland, both from indie team Front Row Motorsports, combined to outrun the absolutely dominant trio of Matt Kenseth, Jimmie Johnson and Carl Edwards. If this wasn't quite a 16 beating a 1 in the NCAA tournament, a journeyman winning the Masters, or a mule taking the Kentucky Derby, it was close enough. The emotion and disbelief were evident on both Davids' faces as they spoke after the race, and team owner Bob Jenkins was beaming with the kind of serenity that only comes when you've done everything exactly right and it's paid off better than you could have hoped.
"In the racing graveyard, my epitaph won't be, 'I won the most races or championships,' but I want to be known as a team that did the most with the least," he said. "We work within ourselves. The chassis we run, we build. We're unable to go out and buy products from other teams and that's a disadvantage, but on a day like today it really makes you feel good because you know the equipment that you won the race with was what you built in your own shop."
Ragan won thanks to some last-lap cunning and impeccable timing, knifing through the field as Kenseth, Johnson and Edwards struggled to maintain the supremacy they'd held all day. This wasn't tandem racing, not quite, but Gilliland was able to shove Ragan to the front from 8th place on the last restart, and by the final turns of the race Ragan had Talladega completely in control.
For much of the afternoon, however, it appeared that Mother Nature would own the day, with Edwards ? in first place when the rains fell thanks to a daring move of his own ? getting the win by default. NASCAR moved up the start time of the race by 13 minutes, which in the end made little difference. The rain came, as the forecasts predicted it would, followed by hail and lightning. But credit NASCAR's new "Air Titan" track-drying system for getting the 2.66 miles of Talladega dry enough to fit in the entire race as night fell.
Still, this is Talladega, and that means wrecks are in the mix. Plenty of them. Two major wrecks shaped the race, one before the rain delay and one afterward. Kyle Busch triggered the first wreck when he misjudged the moves of Kasey Kahne; Kurt Busch was the most dramatic victim of the second one, set in motion when Ricky Stenhouse Jr. bumped JJ Yeley into a thick pack of drivers. The first wreck involved 13 cars, the second, 12; Marcos Ambrose, Jamie McMurray and David Stremme had the misfortune of being in both.
Kyle Busch took responsibility for the first wreck, but Ryan Newman had a different target in mind for the second: NASCAR itself. "They can build safer race cars, they can build safer walls, but they can't get their heads out of their asses far enough to keep them on the race track, and that's pretty disappointing," Newman said. "I wanted to make sure I get that point across, and y'all can figure out who 'they' is."
Newman continued: "That's just poor judgment in restarting the race," he said. "I mean, you got what you wanted, but poor judgment in running in the dark and running in the rain."
Other drivers took a slightly different view, one unobstructed by wrecking cars. "I could see everything," Martin Truex Jr. said. "You can't see much racing these things all day anyway ... Once that last caution came out, from there to the end it was raining a little bit the whole time, so you've got the wet windshield, the Speedy-Dry flying around, and it's like your windshield gets this crappy mist-looking mud on it. Nobody could see that good, but you see far enough ahead of you and around you to see what's going on."
"I was really grateful personally that NASCAR let us run that green-white-checkered," Edwards said afterward. "It had to be a tough call for NASCAR, but we could see well enough. The one thing NASCAR did was gave us time to change our visors. I put on a clear visor. I think a lot of people did. So we were all prepared for less light."
Even that wasn't enough controversy for one race. Brad Keselowski, last year's spring Talladega winner, took to Twitter immediately after the race to protest:
mad as hell about that finish. We were suppose to line up 10th when the 34 switched lanes entering 3 before green. That lane won.BS
? Brad Keselowski (@keselowski) May 6, 2013
NASCAR, however, countered that it properly lined up the racers ahead of time, and Ragan agreed with that assessment. "Obviously Brad wanted to start on the outside, because he knew the same thing that I knew, that the outside lane had an advantage on the restart, but he just didn't want to listen to NASCAR," Ragain said. "Brad was just trying to snooker us and get the preferred lane, and eventually he decided he should do the right thing, and he restarted ninth and restarted 10th, so there's no controversy."
No controversy? At a Talladega race? Yeah, right.
-Follow Jay Busbee on Twitter at @jaybusbee.-
Skip Barber Paolo Barilla Rubens Barrichello Michael Bartels
Wednesday
Di Resta Predicting Strong Result
Paul di Resta believes that Force India are in a good position to secure an impressive result during this weekend?s Canadian Grand Prix. The green, white and orange squad have made a fine start to 2013, and are currently ahead of McLaren in the Constructors? Championship. Di Resta himself has been impressive, and is confident [...]
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Formula1Fancast/~3/-1KqScC4FFY/di-resta-predicting-strong-result
Volkswagen Golf I by Boba Motoring
In recent years, the mark for hyper cars has been 1,000 horsepower, which is completely unreal. Now, to achieve this insane output, mot automakers are strapping multiple-turbocharged V8, V10 or V12 powerplants into their cars. For us normal folk that cannot afford these $1 million-plus cars, we have to perform some creative engineering to reach numbers even reaching the supercar standard of 600 horsepower. And most of the time, that includes a crate-engine swap.
Well, the folks over at Boba Motoring in Germany have a bucked the trend by squeezing an amazing 1,013 horsepower from an Mk I (1974 through 1983) Volkswagen Golf. It didn?t do so by dropping a nasty V-8 into a hacked up engine compartment; rather, it tweaked a 1.8-liter to this insane number. This KR 16-valve 1.8-liter, which was one of the many engines offered in the Mk II Golf, received some heavy mods, including: 144 mm (5.6-inch) long steel con rods; an 86.4 mm (3.40-inch) stroke crankshaft; an 80.98 mm (3.18-inch) bore; an updated intake with eight injectors powered by a KMS MD35 injection-ignition system; an 80 mm (3.15-inch) throttle body; an updated exhaust system; and a Garrett GTX4202R turbocharger that pushes through 4.25 bar (61.6 psi) of pressure.
The engine delivers the power through VW?s 4Motion driveline and out to all four wheels. Not only is this beast powerful, but the 4Motion system assures a breakneck launch every time.
On top of all of that, Boba Motoring also managed to drop the Mk I Golf?s weight to just 900 kg (1,984 pounds), making this a true pocket rocket.
The light weight, massive power and awesome traction all deliver outlandish performance. This one-time throw-away car now hits 100 km/h (62 mph) in 2 seconds and 200 km/h (124 mph) in 5 seconds. The 1/4-incle is no contest, as it tears that apart in just about 8 seconds at 240 km/h (149.12 mph).
Click past the jump to see this beast running the dyno and out on its first test since the tune to 1,000 horsepower.
Volkswagen Golf I by Boba Motoring originally appeared on topspeed.com on Wednesday, 5 June 2013 17:00 EST.
Source: http://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/1980-volkswagen-golf-i-by-boba-motoring-ar157333.html
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