Sports highlight: auto racing

I watched a bit cricket and rugby during the weekend but the main thing was auto racing. First, it was Aussie V8 Supercar, which I had never watched before. Marcos Ambrose raced there and won before he came to US to race NASCAR so I knew they've got pretty good drivers for sure. It was indeed competitive with cars nudging each other for position on a road course, just like the NASCAR road races. What I found most interesting though was the manufacturers and models raced in that series: there are Mercedes AMG as well as Nissan Altima. It seems to me it's a bad idea for the former because they are supposed to be much better than the other "lowly" brands/models (e.g. Ford and the aforementioned Nissan) but they did not actually finish higher in the races!
Back to the States, both NASCAR series were racing at Talladega, which I considered one of the tracks with most exciting races. To be honest, they are exciting for the "wrong" reason: the "big one", i.e., a big crash that almost always happened, once or more, especially near the end of the race. Both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup race ended with last lap passes (also multiple crashes though) The former was enough to make the races interesting. I was happy to see "underdog" drivers on lower-budget teams did well: Regan Smith won the Nationwide race while David Ragan did it at the Sprint Cup race (with his teammate finished 2nd)
More drama from Talladega: During her career Danica Patrick usually did better on longer tracks like Talladega but her day was ruined by none other than her current boyfriend, Ricky Stenhouse Jr, who is a talented driver but with few experience at the Sprint Cup level. He drove too aggressively and caused a big crash that collected Danica. I was surprised this story was not mentioned a lot in the media.
I was so glad I didn't miss the IndyCar race at Sao Paulo because it featured yet another exciting finish! I have been rooting for Verizon/Penske driver Will Power for the past few years. He was almost invincible at road races but seemed to have lost his magic this year. He didn't qualify well but was making his way through the field. Just when things started looking promising, his car was on fire and forced him out of the race. There were a ton of cautions but the last dozen laps were really close with 3 drivers fighting it out. Takuma Sato, the winner of the previous race, was leading but challenged by Joseph Newgarden and James Hinchcliffe. He was accused of violating IndyCar's rule by blocking both. It didn't matter much though 'coz he was eventually passed by Hinchcliffe. The young guns are doing well in this series (Will Power and former champ Dario Franchitti are 18th and 15th in the current standing, respectively) For a sports that couldn't gain enough fan support here due to lack of success of American drivers, it's moving in the right direction.