Overheard at Infineon Friday

We spoke to Dan Pettit of Forsythe Pettit Racing about rumors the team may move up to IndyCar Racing and he said it all depends on landing sponsorship as he and Jerry are tired of writing big checks. So stay tuned…….Dan tells us both he and Kevin Kalkhoven sold their Gulfstream V jets for a big profit because the wait time for them is so long and the demand is so high that some very rich people are willing to pay big dollars to get one now. Both he and Kevin have ordered the new Gulfstream 550 and will take delivery next May or June and still walk away with a nice profit. The 550 flies even further than the Gulfstream V, which had the longest range of any corporate jet already……Meanwhile they are renting Gulfstream IVs to get them around…………We hear that former Premier of Queensland, Australia, Peter Beattie, is flying in from Australia this weekend and there will be a meeting on Sunday here at Infineon Raceway with IRL officials in the hope of coming to a meeting of the minds over the loggerhead on next year's Surfers Paradise event date. Beattie is a key figure in the Surfers event. The Aussies want to keep the equity they have built in the mid to late October date and the IRL folks want the date in September because they refuse to end their championship outside the country, so Homestead on October 11th must be the championship closer. September does not work for the Aussies because that is when their Football playoffs and Super Bowl is played. The race would get no coverage in September. So it looks like if Surfers is on the schedule in 2009 it may again be a non-points paying race in late October, or move to the Spring but that is when the Australia F1 race is in March, meaning the race would have to be in late April putting a crunch on the already busy April schedule and the teams getting ready for Indy in May…….We hear there will be a 2nd round of engine manufacturer talks with the IRL very soon. As we understand it the deal on the formula would have to be done in January, February at the very latest, for the manufacturers to have their engines ready for 2010 testing and racing in 2011. A turbo formula of sort still appears to be the preferred choice………Spotted San Francisco Giant shortstop Omar Vizquel as an interested observer in the Ernesto Viso pit. Vizquel is an 11-time gold glove winner and grew up in the same city of Caracas, Venezuela and they are friends. Could he be the next sports star to get involved in racing?……The car Justin Wilson is driving this weekend is the first time the team has used it in a race after Wilson destroyed a car against the wall in Kentucky. “We brought out our new car — new to us anyway – today," said Wilson. "For some reason my seat didn’t fit as well in this chassis so we spent some time making some modifications for that and now it is much more comfortable. The chassis was previously used by Jon Herb and had been sitting in the shop for a few months being built when there were a few extra hours available, which wasn’t often. Other than that we just spent the day working on the setups and are about where we thought we would be performance wise. It would be nice for us to be a little bit closer to the front but we’ll study the data tonight." Mark C. reporting from Sonoma, CA