Overheard at GP of Alabama

We heard a crazy rumor that Zach Veach, who we think is too young (though Sage Karam is still in high school and he is making a run the way it looks!), could make a run at the Indy 500, but we are not holding our breath. We hear he has some financial backing.

Sebastien Bourdais will start from the back. He was penalized for holding up Ryan Hunter-Reay. Both sides are pretty convinced it wasn’t intentional, and that the team didn’t tell him Ryan was coming up on him…and there wasn’t communication there.

Hearing more that Sage Karam will be farmed out by Chip Ganassi for the Indy 500 to Dreyer and Reinbold who has cars.

Josef Newgarden qualified fourth and is our AR1 pick to win on Sunday, since this is basically a home race for him and he has been running very strong every race. Interestingly enough, he has a rookie race engineer. Jeremy Milless. He has never been a race engineer before, and is really making Josef look good in the early season races.

Weather has been a major concern for this weekend, but it looks like there has been a near heaven-sent window for the race. Storms rolled through on Thursday evening and will return with a vengance early next week with severe tornado weather predicted.

Many here are very concerned, as Alabama has a bad trend with tornados in recent years, the most recent being the largest in recorded history, over one mile in diameter and cutting path through the state for nearly 100 miles, that can still be seen from a commercial airplane flight going west.

It’s going to be a pretty warm race day with temperatures in the mid 80s, humid, and sunny.

We are expecting a three stop race unless there is a prolonged yellow, and we could see some interesting pit strategies early in the race. Scott Morris reporting from Barber