Fourth Turn – Racing, Something For Everyone

Of all the major spectator or participant sports in the US, none can match automobile racing for diversity. Whether one looks at drivers who compete in the sports? varied forms of competition, the multiplicity of tracks, or the myriad championships that are contested, no other sport is so diverse.

Football is the same sport, whether played at the high school level or in the NFL. The same goes for baseball, hockey, golf, or basketball. But racing truly presents a real smorgasbord of pleasures for race fan and competitor alike.

The field for the 91st running of the Indianapolis 500 is a good case in point. Over the past weekend driver Ryan Briscoe, who is solidly in the 500 line-up, traveled to Utah to compete in the American LeMans Series event at Miller Motorsport Park- a four-mile road course. John Andretti, also an Indy qualifier, has spent the past few seasons in NASCAR, running in several series including Nextel Cup. His roots are in open wheel competition, having won a CART event in 1991, but he has also competed in the NHRA?s Top Fuel division, was 1983 USAC Midget Division Rookie of the Year, and competed in the LeMans 24-hour race with Uncle Mario and cousin Michael.

Ed Carpenter has run in the USAC midgets as well as their Silver Crown Division. Milka Duno is a regular competitor in the Rolex Sports Car Series. Sarah Fisher started in 410 sprints, midgets, and spent the 2005 season in NASCAR?s Grand National Division in a Richard Childress entry. Sam Hornish Jr. is splitting time in Roger Penske?s IRL and NASCAR vehicles. All of this in an age where specialization among athletes in other sports is at an all-time high.

NASCAR drivers compete on super speedways, short half-miles, road courses and cookie-cutter 1.5 mile tracks. IRL teams race on the high banks of Michigan International, Milwaukee?s flat mile, road courses at Mid-Ohio, St. Petersburg, Belle Isle and Motegi, Japan?and, of course, Indy?s four corner rectangle.

Then there?s drag racing, rallying, go karts, super late models, modifieds, hill climbs, Formula One, vintage, monster trucks, demolition derbies??and you get the picture.

F-1 champion Juan Pablo Montoya is in NASCAR, Tony Stewart would love to be at Indy, Jeff Gordon should be, and Marco Andretti may move to F-1 shortly.

Bobby and Donnie Allison, Cale Yarborough and Lee Roy Yarbrough have been at Indy, while Mario, AJ, Mark Donohue, Dan Gurney, and Joe Leonard are only a few who have been in NASCAR as well as in Indy cars. Leonard was also a motorcycle champion and Paul Goldsmith ran on two wheels as well as four (open and closed).

Racing may seem fragmented to some; each short track may have its own divisions and rules, differing slightly from the track just up the road. The IRL and CCWS have fractured America?s top level open wheel Championship, but today we DO have 40 drivers racing regularly in those cars. All of this is racing?s attraction- there?s something for everyone. And for that, we who enjoy that diversity say, THANKS!

Paul Gohde

Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.

Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.

The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.

Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.

He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.

Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”

racingnation.com

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