3 words - In, dy, Car (or, unless you are a serious Indycar geek like me, please skip to next post)

OK peeps, springtime on this ol marble is looking much, much brighter for me.

IndyCar has mended its rift and more cars than I can remember will be on the grid this season driving what amounts to the fastest and most competitive formula in all of autoracing.

For all of you who are also race fans with me will say "I know", but stop for a minute and think about that.

Fastest AND Most Competitive.

Think about the last time you watched a car race, ANY car race, where:

• the cars can average over 225 mph on oval tracks,
• top-ending around 235 mph on straightaways,
• turn both left AND right,
• in highly-competitive and scary-close wheel-to-(open)wheel racing,
• with (likely) over 25 cars and world-class caliber drivers in most of them.
• and the cars looked sexy as hell.

I can't remember when that was. Even in the halcyon days of the early-90s when CART was peaking, the caliber of driver was there, but great divides in equipment quality meant that approximately 65% of those cars were also-rans with next to no hope of winning a single race, let alone even be within 5 laps of the leader at the end. That won't be the case now.

The quality of teams coming over to the IRL this year from ChampCar will raise the new pool average greatly. The league is increasing it's car count by nearly 75% and much of that will be race-winner-contending quality. That means in all likelihood a typical IndyCar race will now have around 16-20 cars on the lead lap at speeds that frighten the senses. Those of you who've been there, you know what I mean.

Traffic just got a lot heavier at many of the best American race tracks and, I for one, LOVE IT!