Opinion: Sarah Fisher's Groundbreaking Transition

Today's big IZOD IndyCar Series news came out of the Sarah Fisher Racing camp, as team namesake Sarah Fisher announced her retirement from IndyCar competition. While her No. 67 Dollar General Dallara-Honda will return to competition next season for nine races, Ed Carpenter will be its new driver.

Fisher steps aside after 25 years competing in various forms of racing, dating back to her early childhood. Ever since her early start, she's been a go-getter and an overachiever, scoring everything from multiple World Karting Association championships to IndyCar drives, all the way up to a Formula 1 test with McLaren-Mercedes in 2002. Off the track, she's even written a book, entitled "99 Things Women Wish They Knew Before Getting Behind the Wheel of Their Dream Job". You name it, she's done it.

She first began contemplating a transition out of the car earlier this year, when she gave Graham Rahal a three-race deal to drive the No. 67 to keep him in practice as he looked for more consistent employment. With three full seasons gone by since her last top-10 finish, a seventh place in IndyCar's first Iowa event, and a family-owned team running a part-time schedule against such superpowers as Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske, her prospects for taking the checkers as a winning driver were slim.

But Fisher showed that she could still hang up front with the big boys at Chicagoland this year. She took the lead under caution thanks to an alternate pit strategy, holding it for 10 laps. Although Ryan Briscoe got by her soon after the green flag waved again, she managed to hold her position in the top five for quite a while afterward. If anybody ever doubted that she still had the skills to run up front, even after her brief NASCAR sojourn in the middle of the decade, Chicagoland was their rebuttal.

Now, Fisher transitions into her most difficult and important role yet: full-time team owner.

Yes, this will be Sarah Fisher Racing's fourth IZOD IndyCar Series season, so it's not as if Fisher hasn't had to face those difficult ownership decisions before. Things will certainly be less tense around the SFR shop than they were in 2008, when she and husband Andy O'Gara formed the team out of pocket. That year, a sponsorship disaster with RESQ Energy Drink and an Indianapolis 500 accident nearly sidelined the team for good before it could even get off the ground.

Things have been looking up ever since Dollar General stepped in for two late 2008 events. The team expanded to two cars for 2010, adding Jay Howard to a limited slate of events, and of course had the popular Rahal compete in three events.

Now with Carpenter behind the wheel for the team in 2011, and the elimination of the perpetually off-the-pace second car, Fisher can fully focus on building a strong race team that will compete for IndyCar wins and championships for years to come. Carpenter and Fisher alike have been featured in successful and popular IndyCar marketing programs over the past few years; while Fisher has become a prominent face in Dollar General marketing, Carpenter has represented longtime Indy sponsor Menards and newcomer Fuzzy's Vodka in the past few years. The tandem of two affable American racers with old-school roots (both came from USAC backgrounds) should prove interesting to new potential sponsors.

Of course, Fisher's transition to full-time ownership represents a step forward for IndyCar for more reasons than that. Most forms of motorsport have never seen a top team led by a female owner, IndyCar included. Fisher has the potential to do that with SFR.

IndyCar has already asserted itself as a predominant form of racing for minority drivers, especially women; a record five female drivers attempted to qualify for the 2010 Indianapolis 500, with four - Fisher, Danica Patrick, Simona de Silvestro, and Ana Beatriz - competing on race day. But of the four, only Fisher was financing her own car (not counting Patrick's equity stake in her Andretti Autosport team). And Fisher almost put two cars in the race, with Howard only failing to make the race due to faulty Bump Day strategy. That's a big deal for such a small team, no matter how many cars show up.

Fisher has been embracing the ownership role more than that of driver as of late, anyway. Putting Rahal in the car was a solid move that led to the team's first-ever top-10 finish, a ninth place run at St. Petersburg. It was a decision to improve her team's performance, not to feed her ego and keep her in the car, and it paid off. Fisher gave her sponsor a top-flight driver and a chance to make some noise in their brief time together, and garnered a lot of respect from IndyCar fans and competitors - not only for employing the best driver not to have a full-time ride, but also for knowing when to step aside for the benefit of her team.

Now, the team has a chance to score some underdog oval wins with Carpenter, who came tantalizingly close to pulling out another surprise Kentucky victory this year. And Carpenter has another chance to learn the road courses, his longtime Achilles' heel in IndyCar competition.

Who knows, a strong 2011 season could attract enough sponsors for full-time competition in 2012, when new chassis and engines debut. And in the mess that comes with a blank slate, you never know what a little team could pull out of its hat.

Could Sarah Fisher be the first female owner to win an IZOD IndyCar Series race? Perhaps even the first to win an Indianapolis 500? Don't doubt it. She's never been one not to accomplish her goals.

Silly Season Roundup: November 24, 2010

This week's roundup of potential driver changes in the IZOD IndyCar Series for 2011:

- On this week's edition of the SPEED Report, Robin Miller reported that Graham Rahal is a likely candidate to drive for a satellite operation of this year's championship outfit, Chip Ganassi Racing. Rahal has secured a major personal sponsorship deal with Service Central, which backed Sarah Fisher Racing and Jay Howard for a handful of races this year.

The satellite operation would utilize current Ganassi personnel and basically be a Ganassi team in all but name, an arrangement that some claim is owed to Target's naming rights deal with the team. If the rumors are true, the new outfit would be a two-car operation (fellow American Charlie Kimball is the other potential driver) based out of Brownsburg, in the former Prudhomme Racing shop. Don Prudhomme, the ex-NHRA owner and driver who shut down his operation in January, attended some late-season IndyCar events with Chip Ganassi.

- FAZZT Race Team held a well-publicized test this week with Dutch-Chinese driver Ho-Pin Tung with the help of team sponsor Bowers & Wilkins. Tung tested with the team at Sebring International Raceway in a No. 88 Dallara-Honda, and many indications suggest the team will attempt to bring him on full-time in 2011.

This is not Tung's first flirtation with American open-wheel - he had previously looked to join Champ Car in 2007. The 2006 German Formula 3 champion has held rides in almost every major open-wheel series the world over; in the past four years alone, he's won in Superleague Formula, competed in A1GP and GP2, and held test driver seats in Formula One.

The team's current driver and part-owner, Alex Tagliani, seems confident that Tung will be their second driver next year. Previous statements from owner Andre Azzi had indicated that the team would like to remain an all-Canadian outfit.

- Sarah Fisher Racing will make an announcement about the team's future on November 29. Various rumors suggest that the team will employ a single full-time American driver next year, with Fisher herself only running selected events in a second car. J.R. Hildebrand is one of the top available American drivers, but plenty more are available - Ed Carpenter, Jonathan Summerton, and Townsend Bell among them.

More Sponsors Sign On For Indy

The Indianapolis 500 frequently brings new sponsors into the IZOD IndyCar Series. While some of them may not stick around for long, the occasional relationship may extend through the rest of the season and/or beyond.

Many cars had settled their sponsorship deals before qualifying, but upon making the race (or upon some cars missing the event), a handful of new deals have been signed, if only for this race. Running down the field, in order:

13th-place Mario Moraes of KV Racing Technology will carry Geico logos on the side of his No. 32 Dallara-Honda. Moraes has run the unsponsored KVRT car in every race since St. Petersburg. Moraes carried Banco Panamerica sponsorship in Sao Paulo. Geico, looking to remain in the race, made the natural switch from one KV car to the other when Paul Tracy failed to qualify for the event.

17th-place Ryan Hunter-Reay of Andretti Autosport will receive associate support from Virgin on his No. 37 Dallara-Honda. Richard Branson's mega-conglomerate jumped into Formula 1 racing last year with Brawn GP, the eventual constructors' champion, and 1-2 points finishers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello. This year, Virgin took over the fledgling Manor GP outfit with drivers Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi, renaming it Virgin GP, and creating the first F1 car constructed completely without wind-tunnel testing.

22nd-place Simona de Silvestro will carry the majority of last year's major Atlantic Championship supporters on her No. 78 HVM Racing Dallara-Honda for the race. TDS Telecommunications has signed on to back the car, alongside full-season backer Stargate Worlds and Nuclear Clean Air Energy/Entergy. Nuclear Clean Air Energy and Entergy were sponsors of Newman Wachs Racing in Atlantic last year, as their drivers John Edwards and Jonathan Summerton finished 1-2 in the championship. De Silvestro, their closest competitor, finished third. Each driver took four of the 12 wins on the series schedule.

23rd-place Danica Patrick of Andretti Autosport will welcome Boost Mobile back to her No. 7 Dallara-Honda. Boost sponsored Patrick from last year's 500 to the end of last season, when she signed a lucrative deal with GoDaddy.com. This year, however, Boost will return as a secondary sponsor for the remainder of the schedule. Patrick filmed a commercial for Boost last year that should be familiar to most IndyCar fans, in which her pit crew serviced her car in drag. According to a Sprint news release, Boost will sponsor Adam Carroll in his IndyCar debut for Andretti later this year.

24th-place Bertrand Baguette of Conquest Racing will be funded by Angie's List. His No. 36 Dallara-Honda was the final car to qualify on Pole Day. Angie's List, a site where users can post reviews of doctors and contractors, has dipped into open-wheel sponsorship before, sponsoring Oriol Servia and KVRT in the 2008 IndyCar season finale at Chicagoland.

25th-place Bruno Junqueira will, like his FAZZT Race Team compatriot Alex Tagliani, carry the logos of Bowers & Wilkins on the side of his No. 33 Dallara-Honda. B&W originally planned to sponsor Tagliani only in the season opener at Sao Paulo, but has since expanded their program on the base of very strong results for the team all year.

29th-place Sarah Fisher will add the logos of Service Central to her self-owned No. 67 Dallara-Honda after teammate Jay Howard failed to qualify for the race in a dramatic last-second run.

Other new sponsors to the sport that signed on before qualifying for the race was completed include Quick Trim (Graham Rahal) and Fuzzy's Ultra Premium Vodka (Ed Carpenter). Sponsors returning to the sport for this year's 500 that had their deals in place long ago include Herbalife (Townsend Bell), Mona Vie (Tomas Scheckter), Ipiranga (Ana Beatriz), Window World (John Andretti), and William Rast (Sebastien Saavedra).

Twittography: Indy Grand Prix of Alabama

Here are some of the photos taken by IndyCar drivers and teams and posted to Twitter during race day at the Indy Grand Prix of Alabama.

Plowey - New helmet for the weekend
AJFoytRacing - Vitor Meira signing autographs
Plowey - Lunch
IndyCarNation - Hello, beautiful
SarahFisher67 - Graham Rahal signing autographs
IndyCarNation - Liza Markle and Davey Hamilton in the pace car
ssaavedra29 - Helmet techs
IndyCarNation - Pace cars on track
DRRIndyCar - Mike Conway and Justin Wilson talking to VIPs in the paddock
FollowAndretti - Indy Lights driver intros
IndyCarNation - Charles Barkley in the KV Racing Technology garage
FollowAndretti - Martin Plowman's Lights car
FollowAndretti - Tony Kanaan and Michael Andretti monitoring the Lights race
RyanBriscoe6 - Meet Charles Barkley
IndyCarNation - Bertrand Baguette
AJFoytRacing - Vitor interview
IndyCarNation - Backstage at driver intros
NicoleMBriscoe - Nicole's in the pits with the Team Penske boys
curtcavin - Dario's car
curtcavin - Team Penske
IndyCarNation - Above the track
IndyCarNation - Look at all these race fans!
IndyCarNation - Helio in the winner's circle
IndyCarNation - The podium
IndyCarNation - The winning Penske crew

Rahal Back With NHLR At Long Beach?

The panic within the front office of the IZOD IndyCar Series can begin to subside now, as American Graham Rahal may finally have lined up a full-time ride for the rest of this year.

Multiple sources have reported that Rahal will return to Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing, the only team he has ever driven for in IndyCar, beginning at Long Beach. He will first fulfill his obligations to Sarah Fisher Racing for the next two races, at St. Petersburg and Barber Motorsports Park.

NHLR currently fields one car for Hideki Mutoh, down from two last year and a planned three for this season. Unfortunately, sponsorship for Rahal and Alex Lloyd fell through over the offseason, putting Lloyd in a car with another team and leaving Rahal's prospects totally up in the air.

One of the more widespread rumors was that Rahal Letterman Racing, the former Indianapolis 500 winning team owned by Rahal's father Bobby, would return to fund Graham out of pocket. Other top owners were scrambling to assemble sponsorship packages to at least field the young driver at Indianapolis.

Originally, it appeared that Rahal would only drive these next two races, as team owner/driver Sarah Fisher decided to remove herself from the car on road courses after disappointing preseason test results. Rahal tested sports cars at Sebring recently for Corvette Racing, and was rumored to meet with NASCAR representatives, but has said all along that open-wheel racing is his home and where he wants to continue his career.

Rahal will likely return to the No. 02 Dallara-Honda that he piloted last year, though it is unclear whether or not the sponsor will again be McDonald's. NHLR left the number open in case they could secure sponsorship for Rahal, putting Mutoh in their second car, the No. 06. Mutoh came to the team with Formula Dream and Panasonic backing, as has followed him for the past two years.

Last season, Rahal finished eighth in points with two poles, five top five finishes, and nine top-10s. His best finish was third, which occurred twice, at Motegi and Richmond. His poles came at St. Petersburg and Kansas.

Ex-Newman/Haas/Lanigan Drivers Land on Their Feet

Graham Rahal and Alex Lloyd, the two drivers who ran the final race of last season for Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing and were supposed to return this year, have both secured rides for this year's IZOD IndyCar Series season, although their new team situations are completely different.

Lloyd, the 2007 Firestone Indy Lights champion and part-time IndyCar driver for the past two seasons, will step into a fully-sponsored ride for Dale Coyne Racing. He will drive the No. 19 Boy Scouts of America Dallara-Honda for the full season.

Rahal will miss the season-opening race in Brazil, however he will drive the next two races for Sarah Fisher Racing in the No. 67 Dollar General Dallara-Honda that Fisher herself normally drives. Originally, St. Petersburg and Barber were on Fisher's schedule, but owing to Rahal's 2008 win at the former track and her relative lack of speed testing at the latter, the decision was made to give one of the sport's best American drivers the ride.

Rahal is still looking for a ride for the rest of the season. There is the possibility of driving for Rahal Letterman Racing, his father's ex-IndyCar and current sports car team, if they can secure a sponsor.

Both drivers were supposed to return to N/H/L for this year alongside Hideki Mutoh, who would drive a third car. However, both Lloyd's backing from Her Energy Drink and Rahal's McDonald's backing fell through, leaving N/H/L with only one car for Mutoh, who brings his own sponsorship to the team. Since then, both have faced tumultuous and uncertain offseasons, with these deals coming together at the last minute.

This lack of rides for two of the top young talents in the sport suggests the long way that the once-mighty team has fallen. N/H/L used to employ former Formula 1 champions and some of the most talented drivers the sport had ever known, but in recent years has slipped since the loss of its Texaco/Havoline and Kmart sponsorship deals. McDonald's is the latest big backer to go, although their deal was supposedly more of a kickback as a result of owner Paul Newman's food production company, Newman's Own, supplying the golden arches with coffee.

Opinion: De Silvestro Ready For Success

As far as diversity in major-league motorsports goes, the IZOD IndyCar Series has most of the racing world beat. For one, there's the biggest female racing star in the world right now, Danica Patrick. There's owner-driver Sarah Fisher, whose program has expanded gradually every year since she started her own team, and will even field two cars in some races this year. There's Ana Beatriz, a Firestone Indy Lights Series graduate who will make her IndyCar debut in her home country of Brazil in a week and a half. And yes, Milka Duno may still be hanging around.

But Simona de Silvestro may have the talent to surpass all of them.

The Swiss driver, 21, will join HVM Racing for the duration of the schedule after three years in the Atlantic Championship. Bringing her Atlantic sponsor, Stargate Worlds, with her, she will be one of up to four drivers competing for Rookie of the Year this season.

De Silvestro's first year in Atlantics, 2007, was a struggle, as is to be expected from a young driver moving up. But in 2008, she won the season-opening race at Long Beach, moving up to eighth in points at the end of the year. Last season, she dominated for much of the year, winning four races and staying in the title hunt until falling out of the final race of the year on the first lap. Eventually she finished third in points.

That's three more wins than Beatriz had over two years in Indy Lights, although each woman has a third and an eighth place finish in the standings of their respective series. As for Patrick, she never won an Atlantic race in two seasons despite running for a top team.

Katherine Legge was the last woman to dominate the Atlantic Championship, having spent much of 2005 on top and finishing third in the standings that year with three wins. Legge won in her first career Atlantic start, the 2005 season opener at Long Beach, and was even given a Formula 1 test at the end of the year for her efforts.

Legge, unfortunately, flamed out in Champ Car, perhaps a result of only spending one year in a major development series. A major crash at Road America in her rookie year, 2006, may also have affected her psyche. She has spent the past two years in the German DTM series, but has not yet scored a point in that series.

What gives de Silvestro an advantage over all of these other women, however, is the fact that she has spent enough time in developmental series to learn what it takes to drive consistently well. All of the other drivers in question had major ups and downs in their development seasons, and none of them really spent enough time in one major series to have a barnstorming championship run. Even Legge's 2005 season was marred by four finishes outside of the top five. Last year, de Silvestro only finished worse than fifth on two occasions. Nine races out of 12 she stood on the podium.

Unlike Beatriz, she doesn't have to focus on finding funding to run the rest of the season. Unlike Fisher, she doesn't have to balance the day-to-day responsibilities of running a race team. She can just focus on driving the race car.

In terms of gender, her only competition is Danica Patrick, who seems to be more and more of a falling star every minute. Three disastrous stock car runs, capped off by running full-throttle into the back of another car in Las Vegas, have shaken her. She has improved on her previous year's championship ranking every year since joining IndyCar, topping off at fifth last year, but with more competitive cars capable of winning on the grid this year, she may take a hit. She hasn't won a race since the split-series weekend in early 2008, and even that was won on fuel mileage.

Danica's celebrity is the biggest thing she has going for her, and it gets in the way of her racing. More and more people simply know her as the "Go Daddy girl," and more and more people are going to know her as a stock car driver as she inevitably expands her schedule in those cars.

De Silvestro will not have to face the pressure of being Danica Patrick, and that may be her biggest advantage of all. The expectations on her are not so great, as she is a rookie with zero oval experience driving for a single-car team that has unfortunately brought up the back of the grid for the past couple of years. Then again, last year's issues were partially due to a string of bad luck, and expanding to two cars mid-season began stretching the team's resources thin.

But because of that lack of pressure, she can work with HVM at her own pace, knowing that she will be somewhat competitive at the very least on road and street courses. For what it's worth, De Silvestro bested Patrick in the final open IndyCar test session last week.

By the time the oval sections of the schedule finally come up, de Silvestro will hopefully have had some competitive runs on the road and street circuits. With the confidence that she can run up front in the right situation, she should be just fine on the ovals once she gets a little experience.

Within a few years, provided the team sticks together and make progress, we may see Simona de Silvestro in the winner's circle with relative frequency. Time may anoint her a more accomplished driver than Patrick, if she can avoid the pitfalls of poor equipment and excessive celebrity.

Timing and Scoring Still Has a Few Kinks to Work Out...

The official website of the Indy Racing League, indycar.com, launched IndyCar Race Control today in conjunction with the test at Barber Motorsports Park. While it's a beautiful looking piece of work, providing fans with a leaderboard, leader graph, pit board, fastest laps, and the entry list, it has been marred all day by technical malfunctions.

Drivers and cars that do not exist have been frequently popping up in timing and scoring due to bug logging, according to IndyCar Nation's Twitter account. In other words, while drivers and teams have used the test session as a way to prepare their cars for the upcoming season, the folks at indycar.com have been using the session as a way to make sure that Race Control will be fully functional and glitch-free for the beginning of the season. "That's what tests are for," tweeted the site.

Of course, that didn't stop fans from having fun with it. They joked about the series being overrun with cyborgs, with cars carrying numbers such as "91A" and driver names like "P2.I 9." Some cars carried words for numbers, such as "Green" and "Motorsport," single letters from the alphabet, or real team numbers followed by "$0." Some of these cars mirrored exactly what others on track did (for example, car No. 67$0 posted the exact same times as Sarah Fisher), but some produced fanciful and impossible data. One car was reported at having lapped the track in .01 of a second.

The data for the real cars, however, has been accurate - it's just been a matter of sifting through the gibberish to find the lap times. As of 4:30 PM EST, four cars have broken 1 minute, 11 second lap times as the track has warmed up somewhat.