I've been seeing a commercial for Grand AM racing at 1:00pm today that has an EB MINI muscleing it out with BMWs and others. Anybody know who it is?

 

Yes, it's Tony Nuzzo from Nuzzo motorsports...

see this forum:
https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...play.php?f=122

 

Thanks for the link! 26 minutes to GO!

 

The Comcast Guide says that today's broadcast will be of the Grand Am at Laguna Seca.

I believe it's a delayed showing of a race earlier this month.

 

i'm watching it right now, there are two minis i think, pretty close to the back

 

The Laguna race was last weekend, and they are racing in heat of Phoenix (PIR) in a couple more hours. You can follow the "live" coverage here:

http://grandamerican.com/Events/Event.asp?ID=163

 

Just watched a few minutes of it. I did notice that 3 or 4 faster cars would be bunched up behind a MINI going into a curve and the MINI would come out of the curve way ahead. Of course they'd catch up again, (and sometimes pass), on the straight. Kinda what you'd expect running with much more powerful cars.

 

that race was confusing. Porsches up front, then Mustangs, Cobalts Never did see a MINI ... Way to many different classes on that same track, it would seem like it would be dangerous and I did see one crash.

 

There are only 2 classes in Grand Am. GS (Grand Sport) is the fast cars like Mustangs, M3s, Porches, and ST (Street Tuner) which has the cars like the MINIs, the cobalts (which are the best in class right now) RX-8s and some honda/acuras (accord, rsx, tsx...)

It's a great racing series with a couple problems. First off, there are a ton of amateurs who ruin it for everybody (that's why there were so many accidents) and when the yellow flags come out the cars get split up really badly (it's complicated to explain, but you can be in 4th and wind up a lap behind with an inconvenient yellow)

Great racing though, always exciting to watch.

 

The racing part was fine, it was just that it seemed to be such a huge disparity between the porsches, m3s and mustangs vice the rest of the bunch I was surpised there werent more accidents ... hard to follow who was actually leading the second class as most of what I saw showed only the front runners.

 

at times when i wanted to see the end of the pack it would always jump to another camera and stay on the fast cars

 

When I went to see the Nuzzo race in Virginia, it took me a while to figure out and comprehend that they race 2 classes of cars on the same track at the same time.

If they are seperate classes, and ranked seperate, why put them on the same track at the same time?

 

Exactly my point

Sooner or later one of the fast cars is going to start lapping the slower ones (if not already doing that) and its going to get dangerous.

 

These races are support races for the Daytona Prototype feature races. The track schedule would not allow for each class to have time for separate practices, qualifying sessions and races. Not sure there were enough cars in each class to justify separate races in the first place.

I liked the race yesterday - the MINIs got lots of air time as the leaders were lapping them!

Hopefully the new, turbo MINI will be a better foundation for a competitive race car.

 

i think the current mini isnt a bad platform, its just that there arent enough mini racers. if there were more then we could get our own race separate from other classes