Auto racing

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--- Kurt Busch testifies his ex-girlfriend is a trained assassin





Kurt Busch testified Tuesday that Patricia Driscoll, his ex-girlfriend, was a trained assassin.

Busch was on the stand once again as part of his testimony in a four-day hearing surrounding a no-contact order that Driscoll is seeking against Busch.

After the relationship between the two ended, Driscoll came to Busch's motorhome at Dover in September. There, she says Busch assaulted her and slammed her head against the wall of the motorhome. Busch refutes the allegations.

Busch previously testified that he told her to leave repeatedly on that Friday night.

From the AP:

''Everybody on the outside can tell me I'm crazy, but I lived on the inside and saw it firsthand,'' Kurt Busch said when his attorney, Rusty Hardin, questioned why he still believed Patricia Driscoll is a hired killer.

Busch, the 2004 Sprint Cup Series champion, said Driscoll asserted many times that she was a trained assassin and per the AP, she hasn't disagreed with the statements in her testimony. A decision from the hearing, which concluded on Tuesday, is expected in the coming weeks.

Busch said Driscoll repeatedly asserted her assassin status and claimed the work took her on missions across Central and South America and Africa. He recounted one time when the couple was in El Paso, Texas. He said Driscoll left in camouflage gear only to return later wearing a trench coat over an evening gown covered with blood.

A day earlier, Busch said his ex-girlfriend told him she was a mercenary who killed people for a living and had shown him pictures of bodies with gunshot wounds.

In December testimony from the hearing, a personal assistant to the two said Driscoll said in September she was picked up and slammed to the ground while on the Mexican border.

In an interview with the AP late Tuesday, Driscoll denounced the allegations.

"These statements made about being a trained assassin, hired killer, are ludicrous and without basis and are an attempt to destroy my credibility," Driscoll said. "Not even Rusty Hardin believes this."

"I find it interesting that some of the outlandish claims come straight from a fictional movie script I've been working on for eight years," Driscoll added.

Driscoll runs the Armed Forces Foundation, which is set up to benefit United States soldiers. She's also involved with Frontline Defense Systems, which is a defense contracting company.

According to Give.org, the Armed Forces Foundation does not meet its charity standards.

Busch aso said that Driscoll was monopolizing his life. AFF held events at NASCAR tracks and Driscoll played a significant role in Busch's double-race Memorial Day weekend when he ran the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600.

Busch moved to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014 after spending a year with Furniture Row Racing. He made the Chase after winning at Martinsville in the spring.

Stewart-Haas was his third team in three years after parting ways with Team Penske following a tumultuous 2011 season. In 2012, he was suspended for a race for threatening a reporter.

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--- Meet the lady who's been at every single Daytona 500





DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - There was a time when ladies attended the Daytona 500 wearing high heels, gloves, and hats more fit for a Kentucky Derby than a NASCAR race. It’s true. Just ask the woman who was at those races … and every one since.

Juanita Epton, who goes by the name “Lightnin’”, has worked in the ticket office at Daytona International Speedway since the very first day the track opened in 1959. Sunday will mark her 57th Daytona 500, and the latest stop on a journey that’s gone from the dirt tracks of Carolina to the high-sheen superspeedway of Daytona. At age 94, she’s one of the final connections to NASCAR’s earliest days, and she’s a reminder of how very much the sport, and the world around it, has changed over the last century.

“I love the people that I work with,” she says, “but I also love the customers. I have people who I’ve been waiting on for years and years.”

Lightnin’ got her nickname from her late husband Joe, who said you never knew when or where she might strike. It was Joe who brought her down here more than half a century ago, accompanying him as they dodged winters in North Carolina.

Shortly after World War II, Bill France, the man who would form NASCAR in the late 1940s, hired Joe to serve as an official scorer at dirt tracks around Charlotte. Joe earned a tidy $20 per race, about $275 in today’s dollars. Joe was also responsible for making payouts to the winners, and in an era when promoters often skipped out during the race with gate receipts in hand, Joe and his cash money were a welcome sight among drivers.

As NASCAR grew in popularity during the early 1950s, France decided to build a track that would challenge Indianapolis Motor Speedway for American superiority. France hired Joe, by now NASCAR’s official scorer, to work at his creation, and Joe brought along Lightnin’. Together, the Eptons watched the historic Daytona International Speedway take shape.

“A lot of people say, if you’ve seen one race track, you’ve seen them all. But if you haven’t seen Daytona, you haven’t seen every race track,” Lightnin’ says. “It was something special, watching them build this. Seeing the dirt piled high on each end for the turns. When you had a swamp to start with … it was like something out of a miracle to be rising out of a swamp.”

At that first race, the one where ladies showed up to the race in their Sunday finest, tickets started at $8 apiece, about $65 in today’s cash. (Today’s a comparative bargain; tickets start at $32 now.) There were only four grandstands, and only the first fifteen rows were even set up for bench seating. But Bill France, who lived every moment of every day with an eye toward promotion, understood racing’s growth potential. When he built those small grandstands, he poured the pilings strong and deep enough to support the much larger structures that would one day be built.

These days, Epton works year-round at the track, which hosts two NASCAR weekends plus a host of other motorsports events. She lives alone, just her and her Chihuahua named Lily, and she still drives herself to work in a new Chevy Equinox. (“People said I was crazy, buying a new car at 94.”) Her grandchild and great-grandchild live nearby. Her voice is as steady as ever, and while her gait is a little slow these days, her blue eyes will pierce you.

She doesn’t watch the races. She’s got work to do. “For my 50th anniversary here, they took me upstairs so I could watch the 125s,” she says. “I couldn’t stay up there. I watch my races at other tracks. Here I’m at work.”

She’s also a long way from the tiny all-in-one building that once hosted all of Daytona’s office buildings. Epton’s ticket office today looks out on statues of Bill and Anne B. France. Across Speedway Boulevard, with a majestic view of the track, sits NASCAR’s gleaming headquarters. All around, Daytona International is in the midst of a gargantuan $400 million expansion that will transform the entire grandstand and position the track for its next half-century. Fittingly, Epton was one of the first people to ride the new escalators that will service the Daytona Rising expansion.

Progress means change, and Epton admits there are elements of the old NASCAR that she misses. “Big Bill France used to make sure the drivers came by here and thank the girls that worked in the ticket office,” she says, and her use of “girls” is charming in a World War II-era kind of way. “Michael [Waltrip] came by last week and brought me some flowers. But now it’s such big business, and they’re so busy with their appointments, they don’t do that any more. It’s a minus. It would be uplifting if the drivers came by to say hello to the girls who are selling their tickets. Maybe one day it’ll get back to the way it was.”

The message couldn’t be any clearer if it was skywritten above the track: this isn’t Bill France’s NASCAR any longer.

Even so, Lightnin’ keeps on keeping on, just as she has for decades, opening mail, distributing checks, waiting on fans buying tickets. She handles just about every ticket the track distributes, and over the course of a half-century, with hundreds of thousands of tickets each year …. you can do the rough math.

“There’s no end to it. When you think you’re at the end, here comes someone with another bin full,” Lightnin’ says. “You do what you do, and you do it with a smile.”

[Footnote: A moment, here, to talk about Joe’s courtship of Lightnin’. Yes, NASCAR is a very different sport, but you want an idea of the world in which she grew up? Let her tell you one heck of a story:

“I met him on a skating rink in Mississippi. He was working in Oak Ridge [Tennessee] and couldn’t get off work to get married. A girlfriend came with me to Tennessee. You had to wait a week [to get married], and he couldn’t wait a week. So we went to Kentucky, but you had to wait a week there too. So we went across the border to South Carolina in a snowstorm. A friend of his walked in front of the car across the Blue Ridge Mountains so we didn’t go off the mountain. In Greenville, South Carolina, we woke the First Baptist preacher up and got married. After that, we came back across the mountain to Knoxville, Tennessee. What a honeymoon!”]

[IrOnMaN]

The Daytona 500 was good to watch. Sad to know that it's Jeff Gordon's last one. He's been my favorite and it will suck for NASCAR not to have him around.

[IrOnMaN]

The Sprint Cup: Daytona is under a rain delay. If the race doesn't happen tonight, they'll probably push it to this weekend.

[IrOnMaN]

Update: The rain delay is over. The Sprint Cup race will continue tonight.

[HANZO]

Wait they don't do races in the rain in Nascar? just stick on some wet weather tyres and go makes shit way more interesting.

[IrOnMaN]

Wait they don't do races in the rain in Nascar? just stick on some wet weather tyres and go makes shit way more interesting.

That's Formula 1 racing. In NASCAR, the cars are different when it comes to rain. Wet tires won't cut it.

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The Belgian Grad Prix is on right now, for some reason.

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IndyCar driver Justin Wilson dies from head injury at Pocono


IndyCar Series driver Justin Wilson died Monday after suffering a severe head injury at Pocono Raceway. He was 37.

Wilson was hit in the head by a piece of Sage Karam's car while driving past Karam's accident. Karam, who was leading the race, crashed by himself and debris from his car spread across the track. What appeared to be the nose cone of his car was bouncing on the track and struck Wilson in the helmet and ricocheted into the air. Wilson was apparently knocked unconscions. His car then veered suddenly to the left and he struck the inside wall.

IndyCar made the announcement of Wilson's passing at approximately 9 p.m. ET Monday. The sanctioning body did not take any questions about his death and said he died while surrounded by his family. Wilson is survived by his wife Julia and their two children.

"This is a monumentally sad day for INDYCAR and the motorsports community as a whole," IndyCar CEO Mark Miles said in a statement. "Justin's elite ability to drive a race car was matched by his unwavering kindness, character and humility – which is what made him one of the most respected members of the paddock. As we know, the racing industry is one big family, and our efforts moving forward will be focused on rallying around Justin's family to ensure they get the support they need during this unbelievably difficult time."

The sanctioning body said it would answer questions surrounding Wilson's death in the coming days. Much of the conversation will include asking if the series' cars can be prevented from breaking apart so easily and if canopies are a realistic alternative. The open-cockpit design of an IndyCar is a longstanding open-wheel tradition. But Wilson was hit in the helmet because his head was exposed.

Wilson is the first IndyCar Series driver to die since Dan Wheldon in 2012. Wheldon was killed after suffering a massive head injury in a large crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. That race was the final race of the season and was canceled after news of Wheldon's death. The final IndyCar Series race of the 2015 season is scheduled for Sunday at Sonoma.

Wilson, a native of Sheffield, England, had seven major U.S. open-wheel wins including three in the IndyCar Series. His last win came at Texas Motor Speedway in 2012.

[IrOnMaN]

Today is Jeff Gordon's last race. He'll be missed.

[IrOnMaN]

Should I continue to what NASCAR after what happened? That lawsuit. (-____-)

[hectis]

What is the lawsuit?

[IrOnMaN]

They were hit with a $150 million dollar racial discrimination lawsuit due to the fact the NASCAR was preventing black car owners and drivers from competiting in races.