All-purpose open-wheel (F1, IRL) racing thread

That he walked away with nothing more than a hurt ankle, I don't think anything bad of her tweet. If it had been more serious, I doubt she would've written it. But if she had, then, yeah.

 

On the bright side, that wasn't even close to the dumbest 500 tweet today.

 

If you wouldn't say something like that directly to Scott Dixon or his wife at that moment, you shouldn't blurt it out on Twitter. The lead AP writer for auto racing ought to know the difference between what's fine in a media center full of sarcastic people and what's not acceptable to the general public. But maybe that's why I don't relate to where the business is heading.

Two hours after the Challenger implosion, another writer came up to me in the Kennedy Space Center media room and said, "You realize NASA now stands for Need Another Seven Astronauts?" I thought that was very clever but incredibly tasteless. Thank God there was no social media then.

 

I agree, which is why I don't think the Fryer tweet -- stipulating that it was published after it was clear he was unharmed -- was bad at all. "So, Scott, who would have thought you getting a gun pointed at you wouldn't be the
scariest thing to happen to you this week?" It's more a "sheesh, can you believe that?" kind of thing. I don't get the outrage.

The Denver guy, I get the outrage ...

 

Swear to God, two of the guys I was with picked Sato before the race. I picked Power and the fourth guy picked Dixon.

 

I feel kind of stupid for this, but I'm not sure what's offensive about the Fryer tweet. Even Ganassi and Kanaan were yucking it up about the robbery shortly afterward.

 

Expensive tweet for Terry Frei. He gone.

His original apology included a plug for one of his books.

 

Yeah, he didn't seem real sincere about the apology.

It sucks to see people put the figurative gun in the mouth of their career by being stupid on social media, but when you see how many people are being laid off for only fiscal reasons, I can't feel too much sympathy for those who do it to themselves.

Especially when there are so many cases of social media stupidity leading to firings. If you can't learn that by now, you deserve to be on the street.

 

Including a previous one from his own paper, Adrian Dater.

 

I was happy yesterday to hear on the drive to the ballpark a couple of Chicago sports radio hosts (granted, the holiday crew) spending 5-10 minutes just raving about the 500 experience, as a fan/reporter. I've heard some people not like it or that "once is enough," and we've even had some guys drop out of our group because they're burned out on it at this point, but I was glad to hear that gospel being spread, because I agree with it.

In Chicago, particularly, with the enormous Brooklyn wannabe contingent, you get a lot of cynicism about auto racing from people. Plenty of people I talk to come into the conversation convinced it is a huge redneck Confederate flag-waving event, NASCAR's stigma bleeding over.

 

There was a Japanese family sitting behind us that were decked out in Sato merchandise, and were absolutely giddy when he won. It was pretty cool. I suspect they had traveled here to basically hope for one result, and it happened.