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PRUETT: Triple Stint, 7/13
Written by: Marshall Pruett   
07/13/2009
Oakland, CA
 
Good On Adrian Newey

It took time and having to adjusting to fewer resources than were available at McLaren, but F1 design guru Adrian Newey must be smiling as Mark Weber and Sebastian Vettel have put his Red Bull RB5 chassis to the fore recently.
Newey's March 881 heralded a number of new aero concepts that allowed the naturally aspirated V8-powered car to shadow the mighty McLaren-Honda MP4/4 turbo more than anyone imagined possible. (LAT) » More Photos

Heroes are easy to find in motorsports – usually in the form of a driver – but for me, the men like Newey that craft the machines we see driven so deftly are no less worthy of praise and appreciation.

I watched in amazement as his sleek (and under powered) Leyton House March 881 gave Senna and Prost fits in 1988, and later as his properly funded Williams and McLaren cars ruled most of the nineties.

It took him a while to steer the Red Bull operation to respectability on the race track, but few that have followed his career – myself included – ever doubted he’d bring the team to the thick of the championship battle.

Newey’s always been better at innovating than evolving a design over a number of years, although his work at Williams and McLaren showed he'd mastered the art as well. But I’m not surprised that it took a complete re-write of the 2009 rules for Adrian’s technical leadership and creative spirit to manifest itself in the form of the highly effective RB5.

Nothing else on the grid looks like it and at present, nothing else can keep pace. For all the modern technology and vast staffs of engineers and designers fresh from university, it’s nice to see Newey and Brawn GP’s Ross Brawn – men that got their start and made their names as designers in the eighties – battling it out for F1 supremacy three decades later.

It’s also crazy to think triple-winner Sebastian Vettel was less than a year-old when Newey’s March 881 made its debut!

Bring It Back

The IRL made its first appearance in Toronto this past weekend after the event had been a stronghold for CART/ChampCar since its inception, and it got me to thinking: It’s high time the series brings back an award given to IndyCar drivers that honors one of Canada’s most promising and popular talents, the late Greg Moore.
Greg Moore. (LAT) » More Photos

The IndyCar Series does a great job of acknowledging IndyCar racing prior to the CART/IRL split, but we’re still struggling for complete inclusion of the period when the two series were bitter rivals. One of the victims from those times and during 2008's unification was the Greg Moore Legacy Award.

It’s one I’d welcome to see carried over from CART/ChampCar for 2009.

The award, given to the driver “who most typifies Moore’s distinctive combination of on-track talent and dynamic personality,” has past recipients of Helio Castroneves (2000), Dario Franchitti (2001), Patrick Carpentier (2002), Sebastien Bourdais (2003), Ryan Hunter-Reay (2004), Oriol Servia (2005), and Justin Wilson (2006-2007). Looking at many familiar names in the 2009 championship and a few new bright stars, there are plenty of great candidates to consider for the award this year.

Collecting hardware and checks at the IndyCar banquet each year is highly valued by every driver, but winning the Moore Award always carried a deeper significance. The Canadian might be unfamiliar to some IRL diehards or those somewhat new to the sport as Greg spent his all too brief career in
the defunct CART series, but the award -- created in his name after Moore’s death at Fontana in 1999 -- had been the most personal and revered amongst the drivers in his series.

With the IndyCar Series making two trips to Canada and with so many drivers competing in the series that raced alongside Moore, it’s only fitting to keep this very relevant award going.

“I’d love to see the Greg Moore Legacy Award back,” said 2004 recipient Ryan Hunter-Reay. “He represented then and still does represent so much in IndyCar racing. It was so special to me because when I was karting I went to an IndyCar race and spoke to Greg. I was 12 at the time. He didn’t know me from the next kid, but took the time to speak with me about karting. I looked up to him on the track and off ever since. That award still means so much to me.”

I barely knew Moore as an individual but came to respect his skill as driver when he came down to race in the 1992 USAC West F-2000 series (where he put a beating on the team I worked for and later, put a hurting on my team and all the other competitors in Indy Lights.) What he later did in CART, albeit in four short years with the new and developing Player’s/Forsythe team, was nothing short of amazing.
Patrick Carpentier receives the Greg Moore Legacy Award from Moore's dear friend, Dario Franchitti. (LAT) » More Photos

I’d love to see fans and drivers help me to push the IndyCar Series for the re-establishment of Moore’s award this year (after a hiatus in 2008). The award never came with a check, so money isn’t an obstacle to overcome, (barring the cost of the trophy itself), and I can’t think of any political hurdles to prevent it now that ChampCar is gone, so let’s see if we can bring it back.

Two more quick notes – it’s too late for this year, but ChampCar also changed the name of their pole position awards to honor Greg when the series visited Canada. Is that also a tradition you’d like to see continued?

Are there other awards you’d like to see IndyCar bring back or create? Do you support IndyCar re-establishing the Greg Moore Legacy Award?

and tell me what you think. I’ll assemble everything I get before reaching out to IndyCar with our initiative.

(NOTE: It seems my choice to avoid mentioning the Indy Lights Rising Star Award (given in Moore's name) caused a bit of confusion. I purposely opened the piece mentioning Greg's full award needed to be brought back and given to IndyCar drivers. The fact that Greg's award is now only for Indy Lights touched a nerve with more than a few IndyCar drivers when I was forming the column, and in the interest of keeping things positive, I steered clear of it altogether. Let's just say that in less than 24 hours of emails from fans and a few calls from ICS drivers, there are some pretty strong feeling about Greg's award being brought back to its stature as an award for IndyCar pilots. I also avoided going into the fact that the current IndyCar Legacy award, given in the name of 7-time IRL series starter Tony Renna (who lost his life in testing in 2003), might be reconsidered for the Indy Lights award as Tony had done three years in Lights and was just getting his start in IndyCars. Moore had completed four years as an IndyCar driver and had won five races before his passing. I'll address this as planned next week.)

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