INDIANAPOLIS – IndyCar has tapped into a new industry for sponsorships.

Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports on Thursday announced its partnership with DEFY – a CBD-based sports performance drink co-founded by Pro Football Hall of Famer Terrell Davis –  at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The product’s name is displayed on James Hinchliffe’s No. 5 and Marcus Ericsson’s No. 7 Hondas.

Maximum Security crossed the line in  first place, but the victory lap was short-lived, with the thoroughbred subsequently disqualified in a stewards' call

Fans Outraged, and you gotta ask if this was a fixed race and will lawsuits ensue...

Country House has won the 2019 Kentucky Derby after first-place finisher Maximum Security was sensationally disqualified in a stewards' call.  

Maximum Security had crossed the line first, but was taken down due to an incident on the final turn when he veered out of line and impeded War of Will and Long Range Toddy.

also: Ky Derby writeup: 

With only five more weeks of regular season play, the NFL is still the object of scorn on social media as fans wonder why stadiums from coast to coast have loads of empty seats.

Click here to read fan comments!

By Bob Barney

NASCAR Hall Of Famer David Pearson, 83

Three-time NASCAR Champion David Pearson, who won 105 races in the series, which rank him second in NASCAR Cup Series competition behind only seven-time series champion Richard Petty’s 200,  has died. He was 83 years old.   Pearson, known as “The Silver Fox,” and is one of the best drivers to compete in NASCAR.    

David Pearson’s 105 NASCAR victories and his rivalry in the 1960s and ’70s with Richard Petty helped set the stage for NASCAR’s rise into a mainstream sport with national appeal.  When he retired, he had three championships – and millions of fans.

Richard Petty called him the greatest driver he ever raced against, and said in a 1970's interview that he had so much respect for Pearson that if he were following him and David turned right into the wall, he would follow him.  Petty also said that the famous crash that they had during the Daytona 500 (which Pearson won) was probably one of the only time the two touched each other in 20 years of racing.  Both men were clean racers, that didn't push and ram their way into victory lane.     “I want to thank Richard Petty, too,” Pearson said when he was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2011. “He’s probably the one that made me win as many as I did. I run hard because he’d make me run hard. Sometimes he would make a mistake and I’d pass him. Of course, I didn’t ever make mistakes … I’ve had more fun running with him than anybody I ever run with ’cause I knew if I ever went to a race track and he was there, if I could beat him, I’d win the race.”

Petty, in a statement Monday evening, called Pearson his “toughest competitor......I have always been asked who my toughest competitor in my career was. The answer has always been David Pearson,” said Petty. “David and I raced together throughout our careers and battled each other for wins- most of the time finishing first or second to each other.

“It wasn’t a rivalry, but more mutual respect. David is a Hall of Fame driver who made me better. He pushed me just as much as I pushed him on the track. We both became better for it. We have always been close to the Pearson family because they were in the racing business, just like us. We stayed close, and I enjoyed visits to see David when going through South Carolina. We will miss those trips.  Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Pearson family and friends.”

In a personal note, Pearson was one of my childhood favorites, and I often believed that if he had raced as often as Petty, he too would have had 200 victories or more. Pearson rarely drove all the races back in the 60's, when NASCAR raced many times at small unprofitable tracks. 

The native of Spartanburg, S.C., was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1990, the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1993 and the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2011.

A former NASCAR great is on trial this week after being accused of installing hidden cameras throughout his North Carolina home and not telling his then-wife and her mother about the devices. 

Greg Biffle, 50, is being sued for 'no less than $100,000' by his estranged wife Nicole, 42, who claims she spent the final two years of her marriage being surveilled by Biffle and his friend Ricky Matthew Reavis without her knowledge.

It was not just her either, as Nicole's mother Sara Lunders was also filmed on these hidden cameras, having moved in with the couple in 2011 after the birth of their daughter.

MORE

Lawsuit: Greg Biffle is being sued for no less than $100,000 by his estranged wife Nicole and her mother Sara Lunders after filming them, allegedly without their knowledge (couple above in 2008)

An out of control driver had to be rescued by his father after getting trapped in his burning car while racing around the track. Mike Jones spiralled out of control and was sent crashing into the walls after he collided into another motorist, before his car went up in flames. 

He managed to drag his son through the window after he had spent around 25 seconds trapped in the blaze.

Despite his son being saved from danger, the heroic father returned to try to help track safety staff put out the inferno!

Mike Jones spiraled out of control and was sent crashing into the walls after he collided into another motorist, before his car went up in flames at South Boston Speedway in Virginia

Richard Petty, the legendary NASCAR driver, is auctioning off some of his best memorabilia, including his most famous race cars.

Bidders will be able to get a crack at buying the 1974 Dodge Charger which Petty drove to victory in the Daytona 500 championship among other accomplishments.

The car is likely to be sold for near half-a-million dollars, according to the Charlotte Observer.

The auction is scheduled to take place this Saturday at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.

Bidders will be able to get a crack at buying the 1974 Dodge Charger which Petty drove to victory in the Daytona 500 championship among other accomplishments

Richard Petty, the legendary NASCAR driver, is auctioning off some of his best memorabilia, including his most famous race cars. A painted portrait of Petty, which will also be auctioned this Saturday, is seen above

The majority owners of NASCAR, the company which operates the namesake U.S. car-racing series and other motorsport events, are exploring options that include the sale of a majority stake, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

The move comes as NASCAR grapples with an aging fan base, stricter safety rules and a competitive media landscape that have weighed on its popularity and made it less attractive to advertisers and sponsors.

The France family, which controls NASCAR, is working with investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to identify a potential deal for the company, three sources said, cautioning that the deliberations are at exploratory stage and no agreement of any kind is certain.

The sources asked not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential.   READ MORE

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Richard Petty rarely visits pit road after a race anymore and usually with good reason. The Hall of Fame driver’s eponymous race team has toiled for decades in mediocrity, with checkered flags all but extinct.

Bubba at Daytona changed the game.

Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr. had driven the iconic No. 43 car to a third-place finish in a Daytona 500 qualifying race, setting off a celebration for Richard Petty Motorsports almost worthy of winning NASCAR’s marquee race itself. 

The King strolled to the pits and hugged Wallace. The 80-year-old Petty wrapped his arm around Wallace , and they walked off smiling toward what each side hoped was the start of a fruitful alliance.

“I just had a guard walk me from pit road to the media center. His name is Richard Petty. I’ve never seen him so excited in my life,” Wallace said.

That Wallace can energize Petty may symbolize as much a true passing of the torch as NASCAR could want: Petty and his deep kinship with old-school fans and the 24-year-old Wallace, a video game playing, social media darling about to make history as the first black driver since 1969 in the Daytona 500.   READ MORE

World-class racing driver and team owner who was the first to spray champagne in celebration

The American racing driver Dan Gurney, who has died aged 86, was said to be the rival most feared by the great Jim Clark. He was at the start of the most remarkable week of his career in the cockpit when, on a Sunday afternoon in June 1967, he mounted the podium at Le Mans alongside AJ Foyt, with whom he had shared the winning Ford GT40 Mk IV in the famous 24-hour race. Gurney was handed the victors’ usual bottle of champagne but, instead of drinking it, gave it a shake before aiming a spray of foaming liquid at the spectators gathered to acclaim his triumph, thus inaugurating a style of celebration that became universally adopted.

He is survived by his second wife, Evi Butz, a former Porsche public relations executive, whom he married in 1969, and by their two sons, Justin and Alex; by three sons, Daniel Jr, John and James, and a daughter, Lyndee, from his first marriage, to Arleo Bodie; and by eight grandchildren.

  MORE

NORTH BRANFORD, Conn. - Modified championship racer Ted Christopher was one of two people killed when a small plane crashed in the woods in Connecticut on Saturday, NASCAR officials said.

The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that two people were aboard a Mooney M20C plane that went down near the North Branford-Guilford border shortly before 2 p.m. Saturday, but they didn’t release the names of the victims.

Brian France, NASCAR chairman and CEO, said Christopher, 59, and the plane’s pilot both died.

The National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the accident. Details of the plane’s itinerary were not immediately released.

The 59-year-old Christopher captured 13 track championships and competed at every level of NASCAR during his career. In 2006, he was selected as one of the top 25 drivers in NASCAR Whelen All-American Series history.  MORE

Patricia Driscoll doesn’t scare easily. But as she stood in front of a conference hall of suits at a university in Vermont, talking about her work as the CEO of a defense contracting company, she couldn’t shake a feeling of dread every time an audience member checked their phone. What if they were googling her? And what if, during the Q&A portion of the program, they asked her about what they found on the first page of search results?

It’s moments like this when the 39-year-old mother regrets walking into the Dover Police Department two and a half years ago to file a domestic violence report against her ex-boyfriend, NASCAR star Kurt Busch.  

When you used to look up Driscoll’s name, you’d likely find headlines about her work as the President of the Armed Forces Foundation, photos of her pre-race kisses with Busch, clips of her appearances on Fox News as a defense expert, and articles in which she discusses how to help veterans suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder.

But that was before Busch allegedly strangled her and slammed her head against the wall of his trailer three times; before a simple hearing over a protective order turned into a media circus and she was publicly accused of being a trained assassin for the CIA; before the non-stop online harassment and death threats; before  ESPN’s multi-part investigation into her role at the AFF and her subsequent resignation; before she was federally indicted on eight counts of fraud and tax evasion. You know. Before.

Today, her search results on Google paint a scandal-plagued picture that follows her wherever she goes.   Read The Rest Here

When you think of NASCAR, it's likely you think of massive crowds, cars speeding past at over 200 mph and the corporate logos splashed on just about everything.

But the origin of the stock car race goes back to the late 1920s and 30s during prohibition when drivers navigated red dirt tracks in souped up cars running illegal moonshine from state to state for distilleries.

Bill Blair Jr. is the son of Bill Blair, a legendary bootleg runner who also was a professional racer and was one of the original drivers who raced with Bill France, the founder of NASCAR.

"The first cars that he raced were liquor cars," Blair Jr. explained. "You haul liquor at night, and on the weekend, they'd have the race and you'd use your liquor car."

Alix Hines/CIRCA

Daniel Pierce, an author and history professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, said the automobile was a major development for people in the moonshine business because it made it easier to transport their product. Bootleggers, he explained, quickly developed high-speed driving skills to evade law enforcement.  MORE

NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt in his car (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Bob Barney

One does not have to be very attentive much to see that auto racing, especially NASCAR are losing fans in droves.  The decline started with the worldwide depression that occurred in 2008-2014.  As racing expenses grew, and the cost of tickets grew along side of it, fan base slowed.  Nascar can go all the way back to Dale Earnhardt's death to see when their audience began to dwindle.  

For example on the same night as the Virginia Tech-Tennessee game, a Nascar race at Richmond, Virginia, drew 2.7 million television viewers, less than half as many people as watched the football game. TV ratings for the Richmond race were said to be down 12% from the same race in 2015 and 44% from 2014.

On Sunday afternoon, butting right into the NFL, the 10-race Nascar playoffs open with a race at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Illinois. You can buy a ticket on the start-finish line with a good view of the entire track on StubHub for $87. A ticket on the 50-yard line for the Bears-Eagles game at Soldier Field a night later will throw you back at least $170.

Some headlines links and comments:

The rise and fall of NASCAR:Why racetracks are removing hundreds of thousands of seats:

Once upon a time, stock car racing was a humble, homespun operation. Drivers were farm boys and shade tree mechanics who learned to race by outrunning the law on back-road moonshine runs. Their cars really were stock: They bought them from the local dealer, fixed them up in the parking lot before races, then went at it. The tracks were dirt ovals, carved out of country fields with a bulldozer. Fans stood at the edge of the track and went home coated in dust. But those days are long gone, replaced by big-budget reality. NASCAR’s tracks are all paved, and the drivers are millionaire stars. At Charlotte, glinting turbine helicopters hover down onto a concrete pad just outside the speedway, disgorging corporate honchos in golf shirts and custom loafers. Polished race team transporters, with hydraulic tailgates and several million dollars worth of tools inside, are lined up near the pits, and a video screen the size of a football field towers over the action. Read More

Dale Earnhardt would be 58 now and would probably not find much to like about stock-car racing. His death on Feb. 18, 2001, in a last-lap accident at the Daytona 500, led Nascar, and motorsports to a larger degree, into developments Earnhardt might have bristled at.

His death on that warm, sunny afternoon in Florida stunned Nascar’s legion of loyal fans because Earnhardt, the seven-time Cup series champion known as the Intimidator, was regarded as invincible. But it also propelled the sport into American pop culture virtually overnight. Read More

Fans explain why they stopped attending NASCAR races:

Another headline touts reasons why Nascar fans are staying away, interviewing fans and their disgruntled attitude towards the sport they claim left them behind

It's not only Nascar!

(Photo by Jonathan Moore/Getty Images)

Hendrick Motorsports announced in a press release Tuesday morning that the 42-year-old driver plans to retire at the conclusion of the 2017 NASCAR season.

Earnhardt Jr. followed his late father, Dale Earnhardt, into the racing business and began his own professional career at the age of 24 back in 1999.

Over the course of his career, Earnhardt won 26 of his 603 starts and was named Most Popular Driver 14 times. He won the Daytona 500 twice and won two championships in back-to-back years in 1998 and ’99. MORE

In a statement issued Thursday, NASCAR said they have terminated the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series sanction and the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour race sanction with the New London-Waterford Speedbowl, effective immediately.

This includes canceling the Whelen Modified Tour 161 race scheduled for July 22 through July 29.

Bruce Bemer (Danbury Police)

Sources tell FOX61, the move is a direct result of the arrest of Bruce Bemer, 63, of Glastonbury.

On March 30, the FBI and Danbury police arrested Bemer, and two other men, in connection to a sex trafficking ring that operated out of Danbury and reached other cities. Police said Bemer was a client in the ring that targeted young men with mental health issues and forced them to perform sexual acts in exchange for money.

According to court documents, Bemer met with the victims dozens of times over the course of years and would on occasion meet them at the Speedbowl.

MORE PLUS FOX NEWS VIDEO REPORT

Sprint car veteran David Steele died during a race in Florida this weekend and the dramatic crash was caught on camera.

The crash involving the 42-year-old took place during the Southern Car Spring Shootout Series at Desoto Speedway in Bradenton on Saturday.

The shocking incident, which was captured on video, involved Steele's vehicle hitting a retaining wall. 

 

 

+11

Steele leaves behind three children. USAC series director Levi Jones said: 'He was a once-in-a-lifetime talent on the track, but even more impressive was the man, the dad and husband he was'

Sprint car veteran David Steele died during a race in Florida this weekend. His vehicle is pictured on Saturday night at Desoto Speedway in Bradenton

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4350976/Sprint-car-driver-Steele-killed-Florida-speedway-crash.html#ixzz4cWfxMRFD

Things got heated on the NASCAR track when Kyle Busch furiously sucker punched Joey Logano after the race on Sunday.

Busch was angry with Logano after his No 18 spun out on the final lap of the NASCAR Monster Energy Cup Kobalt 400 in Las Vegas. 

There was some contact with Logano's car that caused the wreck, and Busch was fuming after watching him finish fourth in the race.  

 Scroll down for  video

 Members of Locano's Team Penske crew quickly pulled their driver away when Busch charged toward him on pit row moments after the race finished

 Officials had to drag Busch away from the mayhem

Video shows him walking down to pit road and launching himself at Logano's crew with his arms swinging.  

Members of Logano's Team Penske crew quickly pulled their driver away when Busch charged.

Officials had to drag Busch away from the mayhem. 

He was visibly fuming and had a bleeding cut on his forehead as he addressed Fox Sports.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4307402/Brawl-breaks-NASCAR-Busch-Logano.html#ixzz4bCwfz0Kx 

NASCAR fans have complained about the scantily-clad Monster Energy Girls on show at the start of the racing season.

Fans took exception to the revealing outfits worn by the models for the Daytona 500's new sponsor.

They claimed the tight leather tops made them feel 'uncomfortable' and were 'inappropriate' for family viewing.

Fans took exception to the revealing outfits worn by the Monster Energy girls

 NASCAR fans claimed the girls were dressed inappropriately and needed to wear more clothes

One observer on Twitter said: 'NASCAR and Monster Energy need to rethink those uniforms for the girls if they don't want naughty jokes.'

Lynn Smith said: 'Wow! Sprint Cup girls were replaced with Monster Energy hookers! Really? NASCAR, the purpose of these girls is unnecessary, always has been!'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4242470/NASCAR-fans-backlash-against-Monster-Energy-girls.html#ixzz4ZG5CilBZ 

TIES PETTY and Earnhardt