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

Twittography: Sao Paulo Indy 300

Here are some of the photos taken by IndyCar drivers and teams and posted to Twitter during race day at the Sao Paulo Indy 300.

LuczoDragon - Front wing shot
LuczoDragon - Team meeting between Jay Penske, Gil de Ferran, and Rafa Matos
LuczoDragon - Engineers watching the telemetry during qualifying
LuczoDragon - A crew member alone in the pits
LuczoDragon - Three DFLDR engineers on their computers
LuczoDragon - Rafa Matos interviewed by local media
LuczoDragon - Rafa Matos and Davey Hamilton
IndyCarNation - New mats
AntonioPizzonia - Former F1/CCWS driver Antonio Pizzonia on the grid
DRRIndyCar - Bia Figuereido's car, pre-race
IndyCarNation - Marco Andretti's car, after the first-turn accident
DRRIndyCar - Rain on the way
DRRIndyCar - Drenched pit lane
DRRIndyCar - The Brazilian fans cheer through the rain
IndyCarNation - The top three cars at the finish

De Silvestro Set For 2010

Confirmed via the Twitter accounts of both driver and team, Swiss driver Simona de Silvestro will contest the entire 2010 IZOD IndyCar Series schedule for HVM Racing. She will drive the No. 78 Team Stargate Worlds Dallara-Honda.

De Silvestro, 21, has spent the past three years in the Atlantic Championship, with a best finish of third last year. In 34 career Atlantic starts, she has five wins, four of them coming last year with US RaceTronics (operating under the Stargate Worlds banner). She was in the championship hunt for most of last season, before a retirement on the first lap of the season finale knocked her from contention. Her performance helped her earn a handful of IndyCar tests this offseason, in which she performed respectably.

HVM ran one car for E.J. Viso for most of last season before taking on Robert Doornbos just over halfway in. Viso failed to finish his first seven races, while the best finish Doornbos could muster in five events for the team was 10th place. This came in stark contrast to Doornbos' 2007 season with the team in Champ Car, where he finished third in the championship and won rookie of the year for the team, then known as Minardi Team USA.

Doornbos was originally to run for HVM again in 2010, but funding did not come through. Doornbos' uniform in 2009 carried patches for energy drink maker Red Bull and financial institution ING, although the car itself did not. Red Bull gave Doornbos three starts in Formula 1 in 2006 and ING, like Doornbos, is Dutch. It appears, however, that a difficult season marred by feuding with onetime teammate Graham Rahal and poor performance on ovals ended those sponsorships.

Stargate Worlds is an online role-playing video game that is part of the Stargate science fiction franchise. Still in production, it will be the second Stargate video game to be released. 2010 will be the second season of open-wheel sponsorship for Stargate Worlds and developer Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

Plenty of Drivers Sitting on the Sidelines

While most of the IZOD IndyCar Series took to the track for preseason testing today, a handful of solid talent was either roaming the sidelines or nowhere to be found.

Among the drivers pacing the pits were Ana Beatriz, Ed Carpenter, and Mario Moraes. Of the three, only Beatriz has a confirmed deal for this year, and even that is only for the season-opening race at Brazil. Carpenter is actively seeking sponsorship to get back on track. Moraes brings some money from Votorantim, the Brazilian construction company owned by his grandfather, but so far has been unable to secure a ride.

Oriol Servia has also been roaming the pits looking for a ride. He ran five races last season, with only one DNF and a worst finish of 11th in the four races he completed. Servia has mostly kept in contact with the open-wheel world via Twitter, and while he continues to search for a ride, the lack of success has proved to be a point of frustration for the Spanish driver.

Paul Tracy has been spotted at the test sessions, but his voice has been heard by the community over the past few days. He, like Servia has used his account to keep his name out there; most of his tweets bash the insurgence of foreign pay drivers and lack of North American talent in the series. He has implored fans to send a message to the league, particularly incoming CEO Randy Bernard, that the direction in which the sport has been heading needs to change.

Worst of all, popular and talented young American Graham Rahal does not yet have an IndyCar ride for 2010, and it appears he may be meeting with stock car teams in an attempt to secure a drive. Rahal scored two poles, five top-fives, and none top-10s last season on the way to a seventh-place finish in points, but has no sponsorship to bring to team owners. Multiple teams have attempted to put programs together for him, but for almost every group the hang-up has been sponsorship, leaving one of the league's most marketable young drivers on the sidelines.

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.