NahSCAR?

Supercars Championship is something Yours Truly has been somewhat following for a while. Off the top of his head, he can name several top drivers like Craig Lowndes, Jamie Whincup, Cameron Waters, etc.

And of course, Shane van Gisbergen of New Zealand.

In fact, van Gisbergen has been dominating so much like Max Verstappen in Formula 1 that he is probably the only Supercars driver that Yours Truly can pick out from a Police lineup, if there is one.

(Speaking of Verstappen, he and van Gisbergen both drive a car with Red Bull livery and, of course, they both have Dutch heritage.)

Then, Trackhouse Racing in the USA came calling as part of their effort to put international drivers behind the wheel in selected NASCAR races, in particular street and road races. Van Gisbergen took up the offer, and entered the race in Chicago.

The Grant Park 220 to be exact, held in the Chicago Street Course last weekend. Van Gisbergen impressed right away in testing and qualifying, and started the race third on the grid.

He ran in the top ten all day, and challenged leader Justin Haley for the lead late in the race. Van Gisbergen was in such a good form that he overtook Haley not once but twice for the lead, after his first overtaking maneuvre was judged to have taken place just after a yellow flag was shown. He became the first driver to win a NASCAR race on his debut in 60 years, since the legendary Johnny Rutherford’s victory in the qualifying heat race for the Daytona 500 in 1963.

Meanwhile, the top three drivers in the standings before the race, Martin Truex Jr., William Byron and Ross Chastain, finished 32nd, 13th and 22nd respectively.

Now spare a thought for the regular NASCAR drivers, who risk their lives every week trying to outrace and outscore each other in one of the tightest motor-racing series in the world.

Imagine you are one of them, having spent your whole life honing your skills, trying to move up the ladder and beat the other 30-plus drivers every single week. Then someone from literally the other side of the world, whom you will probably never see again for the rest of your life, comes and beats you up the only time he races you.

Duh.

Joey Logano, himself a two-time NASCAR champion who finished 8th in the race, said simply, “He made us look like a bunch of fools. A foreigner came in and kicked our butt today”. (Courtesy of Brett Winningham @NASCAR_BRETT)

And he surely did.

Yours Truly, the (Former) Cable Guy

The end of the pay Cable TV service reminds me of the time when Yours Truly worked for them.

Yours Truly's first summer job was with Cable TV.

That was during the Olympic Games in Atlanta, where another college student and Yours Truly were hired to assist in the “live” broadcast of the Games on Channel 06 or 07 in those days. A red-eye shift for Yours Truly, starting from 12 midnight to 6 in the morning.

Due to contractual reasons, Cable TV was not allowed to broadcast the Games live in full. 30% of an event was the most we could broadcast live. Usually we didn’t care about that requirement as we didn’t plan to broadcast anything live, as our main goal was to provide regular verbal updates, without footage, on some of the more popular events every 30 minutes, hosted by an athlete-turned-commentator who used to play goalkeeper for the Hong Kong national soccer team.

But that requirement became a major issue when we decided to broadcast the men’s 100 metre race live.

Not every part of a race is created equal, and the most exciting part, of course, is the finale. That is why our plan was to broadcast the final 30 metres or so of the race. And what about the first 70 metres or so? Our plan was to pretend that we had overrun the commercials, but somehow managed to catch the last part of the race, just as we returned from the break.

We had the commercials lined up, and the host fully ready to start commentating at a certain time and hour. The schedule was announced months in advance and we could plan around it. Say, the race was scheduled to start at 4:00, and we were ready to end our commercials and start our “live” broadcast at about 4:02.

But we forgot about the jump starts, a pesky and annoying thing that had disrupted our plans. While the experienced Olympic runners were rarely unnerved by them, our host, this time a former track and field coach, was left completely stranded as he had to start rambling while staring at our cameras when we returned from the commercials, and we could not put the live broadcast on screen yet. Thankfully, he didn’t have to ramble for too long as the race finally started shortly afterwards, and Yours Truly remembers that our live broadcast began around midway through the race, despite the 30% requirement.

As for the most important question? Who won that damn race?

No one really knows. In fact, no one really cares, after all these years.

It was just another day in the office.