Indycars at St. Petersburg

As a usual addition to the trip to Sebring I also added the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg to this years calendar. A great event every year with a lot of familiar faces on and of track. Due to work (yes, even I have to work sometimes) I wasn’t able to make friday, so it was a short 2 day weekend compared to most other races. Nonetheless saturday was a long day with hardly any breaks. But with races for Indylight, ferrari’s, F2000′s and World challenge it was most certainly not boring. After that CFR region SCCA had a wonderfull dinner prepared as usual to get some energy back for the next day. After a short night, Sunday had races for F200, Inylights and World challenge again, which had good racing again, both in the front of the pack as the back of it. World challenge had the regular safetycar as usual, but that’s no surprise. The main Indycar race was interesting as well although at some point cars seemed to be dropping as flies, but obviously cars can get restarted by the safety team and continue, which helps the number of cars on track. Due to the fact that we had the safety team next to us, there was unfortunately no orangemen action, although Nancy and Rod made TV this time.

 

After the Ferrari race at the end and the clean up, we discovered that our orangebear, who had been the cross track worker for the weekend was not there anymore, after asking around nobody had seen him being picked up and even after looking into tires and asking some fencing people as well as TV people, we had to conclude that it was stolen. An outrage !!

The orangebear was a great gift from our fellow orangemen from the UK and had been our companion since the Sebring race. After the people from the city of St. Petersburg, who stay with us at turn 4, heard about the bear being stolen, they asked around some more and brought it up on their Monday morning meeting, the organisers brought the word out that if the bears was not to be returned, people world be fired and surprisingly it turned up. It was apparently stolen by one of the fencing people. So needless to say I was happy to hear they called on Monday before I left and I went and picked it up on my way to the airport. Thanks again Jerry and Tom !

All-in-all a great trip, Thanks to all our friends across the pond !

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One Response to Indycars at St. Petersburg

  1. Jerry Fortney & Tom Smith says:

    Thanks for the front page photo. The bear looks great and we are very pleased to have been able to recapture that illusive creature. Please keep a tight reign the little fellow. See you and bear next year. Tom and Jerry

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