Sports highlights: Road course specialists

For IndyCar and NASCAR, road course expertise is certainly different from that of oval tracks. 4 time defending NASCAR champ Jimmie Johnson has not won on road course until this year at Sonoma. In fact, he raced in other competitions at road course in order to prepare himself better and that paid off. At the other end of the spectrum is Juan Pablo Montoya, who has raced in Formula 1 before and now in NASCAR. He won two times so far in his NASCAR career, both on road course! There was a roughly half-half split between road course and oval for this IndyCar season. And IndyCar had its last road course race of the season the weekend before. Will Power was crowned the king of road course (for having the highest point total in all road course races. There will also be a champion for oval only and of course an overal champ) Power was also the overall point leader. However, his closest competitor, Dario Franchitti, was considered a better driver on oval than Power and could make up the difference in the remaining races. For a while during the race last weekend, Power proved that he was not just a road course driver but he could do as well, if not better than, Franchitti on oval. Unfortunately his car ran out of gas and Franchitti took a risk by not taking any tire at the pit to get to the front, and won!

For NASCAR, there was a different story: a group of drivers branded road course specialists race exclusively on the road course races of NASCAR (which is held much fewer than oval races) Boris Said is arguably the most famous among them (also because of his hair-do) In fact, some NASCAR drivers learned road racing skills from him. Last weekend NASCAR's 2nd tier Nationwide series raced on the Montreal road course. Said was one of the favourite again (many predicted him to do well in previous road races too but he has not won before, not counting his lone victory in NASCAR truck series) And he had to compete with the local favourite, the Canadian and former F1 champ, Jacque Villenevue. After the frontrunners all having trouble (bad battery, broken track bar and running out of feul), he took the lead and won the race. That's a feel good story. And I guess he didn't mind being a road course specialist last weekend.

Star of the day: Peter Lenz

Peter Lenz, a 13 year old motorcycle racer, died when he crashed at an Indy race last weekend. It was sad. I am sure he was a talented driver, competing this young at this level. RIP.