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I had the good fortune to attend this year’s inaugural MotoGP race at Indianapolis.  I was with three others local to me and we were part of a larger Aprilia gathering sponsored by AF1racing / apriliaforum.com and Aprilia USA.  This is the Cliff’s Notes version:

• Got in late Friday night
• Saturday was hot and humid (weather said 80% rain…it didn’t)
• Watched all of the practice sessions and qualifying for MotoGP.
• Noticed that the factory tents were gear much more towards customs than before…especially Yamaha
• Saturday night was spent with Aprilia guys at an Aprilia gathering.
• Put a lot of faces to forum names and met a lot of great people.
• Sometimes the electronic version of a forum member is better than the actual person…
• Sunday was mild weather, but we knew the rain was coming.
• It did at around 1PM for an hour.
• Crazy-ass 50-80mph winds from Hurricane Ike.
• Nicky was kicking ass.
• Rossi kicked just a little more ass and passed Nicky.
• Lorenzo was about to do the same and the race got red-flagged.
• 250cc GP was cancelled or postponed at least.

A great time was had even with the crappy weather.  No idea why the race was red-flagged at the time because while the weather wasn’t great, it didn’t change dramatically to force a red flag.  I would have liked to see the eight lap non-aggregate sprint thought, but it was not to be.  Nicky gets the Iron Man award for riding with a broken heel.

I later found out from an insider that the power had gone out on the back side of the track during the race.  In addition, the Yamaha tent collapsed during the pace and it was stated that there were injuries.  Those injuried req’d EMT attention which depleted the race available EMT staff.  That was the cause of the red flag - insufficient EMT for the racers once they were called to service those by the Yamaha tent.

I’ll be positng more detailed articles about the weekend all this week, so let this serve as a teaser.

SIDEBAR:  I ran into Michael Czysz, CEO and owner of Motoczysz at the Indy airport.  He was on the same leg to Chicago as I was.  I met him when he invited me to tour the Motoczysz operations a back in the spring of 2006.  He stated that Motoczysz is surviving but has been streamlined a little.  The project is still alive and well.  Heh - I wanted to talk about his job and he wanted to talk about mine - the automotive industry.  Funny.