Mid-Ohio - Day one

I was pretty excited when my dad brought up the idea of a trip to the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course the first weekend in August for the IZOD IndyCar Series race, and also the American Le Mans Series. It's a bit of a drive (we split up over two days each way), but it is certainly well worth it.

Mid-Ohio is a 2.25-mile, natural terrain road course. It is a similar venue to Road America in Wisconsin where my family made annual visits for many years, until the race got dropped from the open-wheel schedule. I love RA, and so I thought I would also love Mid-Ohio. I was right.

It was definitely a little weird when we drove through the main gate at the course. Instead of the very familiar Road America, this was an entirely new track for my dad and me. It would have been nice to have Friday at the track as well so we could have done a little more scouting of the different areas of the track, but we made up a lot of ground on Saturday.

One of the benefits of our Super Tickets was having access to walk in the paddock/pits area. That was the first order of business. Walking the paddock is always fun because you can see the cars up close, mechanics fine-tuning engines and possibly running into some of the drivers themselves.

No sooner had we entered the area of transporters, trailers and garages did we have our first driver sighting: Scott Dixon whizzed by on his scooter. We saw quite a few drivers before the weekend was over: Simona de Silvestro, Justin Wilson, Will Power and Ryan Briscoe. We also saw Versus IndyCar broadcaster and team owner Robbie Buhl, as well as IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard.

Of course, Murphy's Law made sure we didn't run into Marco Andretti, since that would have been awesome because I write about him. In fact, we didn't see any of the Andretti Autosport drivers. It was also no surprise to see the biggest crowd of fans hovered around Danica Patrick's transporter. She is the most popular driver in the series, after all (or so I keep reading anyway).

We found a good spot along the fence (a section without debris fencing) to watch the IndyCar qualifying and take some photos. We were right off the exit from pit road, so the cars were going slow enough for me and dad to get some good shots.

The qualifying sessions were pretty fun to watch. If you've never seen these cars in person, be aware that television does not do them justice. TV also flattens out the landscape. The other interesting thing about this track are the drastic elevation changes.

The ALMS race was later Saturday afternoon, and we used some of this time to roam the track. Unlike RA which is four miles, Mid-Ohio allows spectators access to essentially walk around most parts of the track. We made our way around through the crowds of people set up with their lawn chairs, mostly on one of the most popular hills, and kept following the track around until the main straightaway.

We watched a good chunk of the race from a small grandstand in the carousel part of the race course. Then if was off to find a Fazoli's for dinner, since the chain isn't in my backyard anymore. As long as I'm on the subject, we also hit up Bob Evans and Steak 'n Shake twice, Waffle House and Krispy Kreme on the trip. Food is half the fun of a vacation, right?