JOLIET, IL (August 28, 2010) – Milka Duno finished 19th out of 29 entries in tonight’s 200-lap Indy 300 at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, IL.

In her first practice session on Friday morning her on-track time was seriously reduced due to a mechanical issue which caused her to have only 13 laps in the 60-minute session, but it was enough for her to deliver a best lap time only 7 tenths of a second off the practice’s leader.

The mechanical issue fixed, but with no opportunity for a shake-down, Duno qualified 26th for the start of tonight’s race – with a differential of 8 tenths of a second from the pole sitter’s time.

In the last practice session after qualifying Duno was able to reduce the differential from the practice’s fastest driver to 6 tenths of a second.

“I’m happy to be back on the ovals and I really enjoy racing at Chicagoland,” said Duno. “We had some bad luck in the first practice session that really cut down on our practice time but we were still able to improve which is always a good sign. Many thanks to Dale and the team for all of their effort and I’m happy that we had a good result at their hometown circuit!”

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Older image of Patrick, before the media frenzy...

Danica-mania as it is being called in the media, the phenomenon that drives most fans crazy. Danica making the decision to drive in two series, full time in Indy and part time in the NASCAR Nationwide and ARCA series’ has grouped her into several categories. Her media attention has become tiresome to most, “Who cares if she’s running 30th!?” I’ve heard many times during a Nationwide Series race..

I came across this article and it really made me want the options of my readers. Like most I have tons of respect for Danica and by any standards it’s not her fault what the media has done with her image. Read the article below from DelawareOnline.com by Mike Finney. Leave us a comment and tell us what you think. We have to agree with him on some points, does Danica need to get used to the ways of NASCAR, bumping and banging is the way of Stock Cars.. Or should she stick with Indy? Let us know below!

Courtesy of DelawareOnline.com

For better or for worse, Danica-mania is heading to Dover International Speedway next month.

The track is taking full advantage of Danica Patrick’s upcoming Nationwide Series race at Dover on Sept. 25, prominently featuring her on billboards and hosting a free question-and-answer session with her prior to her first race at the speedway.

The biggest question is, “Why?”

Female drivers have competed at Dover before. Anyone remember Shawna Robinson or Erin Crocker? They weren’t featured on billboards.

However, the hype that surrounds Patrick is not because of her out-of-this-world driving skills. Rather, it is because of her cover-girl looks, which should offend all drivers, male or female.

That’s because Patrick’s accomplishments, or lack thereof, don’t stack up to many drivers, male or female.

Patrick has made six starts in the Nationwide Series. Her average starting position has been 29th and her average finish has been 30.5.

Sure, there should be a learning curve, but she drives one of the fastest race cars out there for Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s team, which is supported by Hendrick Motorsports.

Her results so far are embarrassing. Does anyone remember her whining after veteran driver Morgan Shepherd slightly bumped into her at New Hampshire, causing her to spin out?

“Is NASCAR going to let him get away with that?” she said. Please!

Of course, people could also say that she is concentrating more on her full-time IndyCar career. The problem is, she has only five top-10 finishes in 13 races in the Indy Car Series with an average finish of 12.6. She hasn’t exactly been knocking down the gate to Victory Lane there, either.

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EDMONTON, Alberta — On the first few laps of the first practice Friday, with fresh tires and almost no other drivers around her, IndyCar racer Milka Duno lost control of her car, smashed into the tire barrier and shredded her rear wing.

It gave fellow drivers more reasons to call for the Venezuelan racer to be expelled for a driving style they say is dangerous.

“She’s obviously not up to speed,” Danica Patrick said before Duno’s crash during practice for Sunday’s Honda Indy Edmonton.

Patrick said the problem is not so much Duno’s speed as the fact she doesn’t follow accepted practice and move over when she’s a lap down to let faster drivers get by.

“I’m not against having some different speeds up there, but she’s not as gracious about her position as maybe somebody else might be,” Patrick said.

Duno spun out again in the second practice session and finished last. Qualifying is scheduled for Saturday.

The 38-year-old driver for Dale Coyne Racing has been pulled by track officials from two races this year, including last week in Toronto, for driving so slowly she was deemed a hazard.

She has failed to crack the top 20 in any race this season, and was knocked out by contact in Brazil and Kansas. Now in her fourth year of the series, Duno has never finished higher than 14th. She is currently ranked 25th, 275 points behind leader Will Power with the lowest total among the full-time drivers.

IndyCar officials are expected to review Duno’s performance after the season and can remove her if warranted.

Series CEO Randy Bernard said last week it’s critical that all drivers meet a certain standard.

Duno is believed to bring in a critical amount of sponsorship revenue to the Dale Coyne operation, which is low-budget compared with series giants like Target Chip Ganassi and Penske. However, her erratic driving has led to flare-ups with competitors, including one with Patrick two years ago, and most recently with Ryan Hunter-Reay during qualifying at Watkins Glen, N.Y., three weeks ago.

Hunter-Reay, in a clip on YouTube, is seen confronting Duno in the pits, saying she wouldn’t allow him to pass during qualifying, costing him precious seconds.

“Wake up, man. Wake up,” Hunter-Reay is heard gently scolding her. “You just cost me a [qualifying] session. If you’re going to drive that slow you’ve got to [use] your mirrors. You have to.”

On Friday, Hunter-Reay said the showdown was the result of a year of frustration.

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By Raygan Swan, NASCAR.COM

Known for her breakthrough accomplishments on the race track, Lyn St. James is becoming just as popular and accomplished for the inroads she’s making off the track.

Whether she’s hired to be a motivational speaker or recruiting and developing young female talent through her foundation, St. James is just as busy today as she was when the racing pioneer was turning laps at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The reality is that her love for cars and the industry didn’t retire in 2001 with her racing career. St. James said her passion for the sport is still very much alive as she continues to reinvent her role and presence in the sport.

Her most recent endeavor as a consumer advisor takes her back to the early part of her career. A female racing sports cars in her late 20s and early 30s, St. James was trying to gain attention in the media. As one can imagine, it was difficult in the male dominated world of motorsports.

“It was in 1980s,” St. James recalled. “I used to go to New York on my own nickel and pound the pavement trying to get women’s magazines to pay attention. But most of my attempts fell on deaf ears because the magazines were full of fashion and beauty tips, nothing about racing or the automotive industry.”

Regardless, St. James would buy stacks of the magazines and cold call the editors and publishers. It was futile until she reached the decision makers at Cosmo.

“I got the publisher to the Miami Grand Prix and with some help with my Ford deal and their campaign to sell cars to women, I was able to land my own column,” she said.

Cosmopolitan magazine, a lifestyle magazine reaching millions of thought-to-be fearless and en vogue women, was publishing one of the country’s first female race car drivers.

It was an “ask the expert” type of monthly feature where St. James was educating women on how to maintain their street cars. Working with her sponsor Ford as a consumer adviser as well as her race experience made her the perfect authority.

“I remember answering one reader’s question about brakes. I explained the brake system. The reader was so excited that she understood what actually happened when she put her foot on the brake,” St. James said. “You learn that information is power for everyone, and over the course of time you can learn anything you want. It’s not all that hard.”

She maintained her Cosmopolitan column for more than two years before turning her focus to IndyCars. Still, she always educated herself on the new technologies in the automotive industry.

And today she has a new outlet: Accelerate with Lyn St. James — a syndicated automotive video program targeted to women, which will make its debut in January and be available to various broadcasters.

Statistics say women can account for about 50 percent of vehicle purchases and for 80 percent of auto maintenance and repairs, which means it is typically the female in the house taking the car to the shop.

“But still they are not proactive about maintenance which is what we hope to cover,” said St James, who will use a format of two-minute segments covering driving safely, auto maintenance and ownership. She’ll also give viewers a sense of what it’s like to be behind the wheel competing in some of the most famous motorsports events in the world.

And even though she is a famous race car driver who has won races at places like Watkins Glen International and Road America, St. James herself has been a victim of female stereotypes in the automotive industry.

“I have so much fun with that because I can play dumb with the best of them,” she said. “Once, my air conditioning went out and this guy was not treating me so well at the dealership, giving me the run-around. I just needed Freon. I didn’t need a new system. Then he looked at me strangely and noticed who I was. His whole demeanor changed after that, which is a sad story.”

So with just a little bit of knowledge, women might be able to avoid such situations — situations that further the stereotype that women don’t know anything about cars.

“We’ve heard this so often that women are buying into it, but there is nothing in a man’s DNA that says he knows anymore than a woman does about cars,” St. James said. “Like I said, knowledge is power and if you have information, you can save yourself some money and it builds your confidence as a consumer.”

When St. James did sales training for Ford about how to deal with women buyers, she learned that women would practically pull any man off the street to accompany them, in fear they would get ripped off if they were alone.

“Buying and taking care of a car is the second most expensive thing we have behind our house, so you have to know as much about the process as anything else,” she said.

Another issue she feels strongly about is texting while driving. This summer, St. James signed Oprah Winfrey’s No Phone Zone — a pledge not to text while driving.

“I say to anybody that I can drive 230 mph with 32 other cars and I can multitask and I can process information quickly, but not even I text while driving. I minimize phone use in the car altogether. If I am having a conversation, I pull over,” St. James said.

All of these are principles St. James learned as a young woman. Her mother taught her how to drive just before she turned 15.

“My mom had polio, so for her, a car was the most critical part of her life. It needed to work. She relied on it because she couldn’t walk very far so it was more than just transportation,” St. James said. “And if I wanted to take the family car out when I was young, I also had to check the oil and fill it up with gas.”

St. James said she realizes that being able to differentiate the smells of radiator fluid and engine oil is not the norm in today’s society, but her hope is that women will simply take a small initiative toward the basics.

“Next time you’re at the dealership, they might be surprised when you start talking about tread depth and the difference in synthetic oil,” she said.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.

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MILLVILLE, July 20, 2010: Ashley Freiberg made some more racing history Sunday in the Skip Barber competition at New Jersey Motorsports Park.

Freiberg (pronounced FRY-BERG) became the first female driver to win a BFGoodrich/Skip Barber National Series powered by Mazda main event with an exciting victory on the 2.17-mile Thunderbolt circuit during the Grand-Am weekend at the southern New Jersey racing facility.

The 18-year-old driver from Homer Glen, Ill., earlier in the year made Barber Series history when she was the first women to capture a series championship, winning the Southern Regional title this winter.

Freiberg had been close to taking her first Barber national race win this year when she took second at Virginia International Raceway in May. But a female had yet to win a Barber national event until Sunday.

Ashley, starting sixth on the grid in her AkzoNobel car, battled wheel-to-wheel with Spencer Pigot, Felix Serralles and Isaac Lyons for the lead in the 15-lap feature before Freiberg made history with a .007-second victory.

“It was a pretty wild drafting contest,” said a happy Freiberg after the race. “I wasn’t sure if I could get to the lead pack late in the race. But things unfolded with me drafting the leaders on the last lap. I slid to the outside and got the right draft at the right time. It is exciting to win my first Barber national race and make some history.”

Freiberg enjoyed two appearances on the Barber victory podium on Saturday and Sunday in New Jersey. In the Saturday feature, Freiberg settled for a close (.05-seconds) third place to Serralles and Pigot.

“On Saturday, I thought I had a better chance to win,” said Freiberg, now moving into position to challenge for the series title. “I qualified second and led for a number of laps. But I just missed on my timing for the draft. It was close but I had to take third. Our racing in the Barber series has been super close and very exciting.”

Freiberg, who also is battling for the Barber Summer Series regional championship, will move to the Star Mazda Series action on July 31-August 1 at the Autobahn in Joliet, Ill. Freiberg is the first woman to compete in the Star Mazda Series when he made her debut last year at the Autobahn.

“I am very exciting to return to the Star Mazda Series,” admitted Freiberg. “I have wanted to race with those cars again. After racing in the Barber national series this year, I hope to gain enough sponsorship to jump to Star Mazda in 2011. But this next race is big for me. I want to show that I belong at the next racing level. Winning on Sunday was a great thrill. Now I want to do it again.”

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By Laine Bergeson

Leilani Münter is a passionate environmentalist — and a rising star in the motorsports world. It may seem like a paradoxical pairing. But in Münter’s mind, that’s a good thing. She believes that the faster she drives, the easier it will be to sell her environmental message to the sport’s 100 million U.S. fans — a group not widely associated with overt ecological concern.

Münter, 34, first made headlines when she placed fourth in a USRA Super Late Model Series event at the Texas Motor Speedway in 2006 — the highest finish by a female driver in the history of the track. And she’s been using her high-profile racing career to spread a pro-environment message ever since.

Münter realizes that for the most part, she’s not preaching to the choir.
“If I didn’t have the racecar,” she says, “most of these folks probably wouldn’t be paying attention to me.”

So she keeps her message to fans simple: There are easy ways to lighten your footprint, such as recycling, LED lighting, solar water heaters and alternative fuels. “I just try to talk about the things that I’m doing,” explains Münter, who lives with her husband just outside Charlotte, N.C.

“I say, ‘Hey, I just put in a rain-water collection system.’ Then I’ll put a picture on my Web site of my little project at home or my solar lights or my new LEDs.”

Münter acknowledges that motorsports are anything but low-impact — although the longtime vegetarian points out that the meat industry emits more greenhouse gases than all types of automotive traffic combined. She has lobbied NASCAR and other racing organizations to use alternative fuels (the IndyCar circuit has been fueling its cars with 100 percent ethanol for many years). Meanwhile, to offset her own greenhouse emissions, she adopts an acre of rainforest through the World Land Trust prior to every race.

She also accepts only environmentally responsible sponsors. She’s backed these days by GREENandSAVE, NativeEnergy, LED Savings Solutions and GroSolar, among others.

Münter, who studied biology and ecology at the University of California, San Diego, has been racing professionally for nearly nine years, but she started promoting her environmental message in earnest in 2006.

At first, it didn’t go so well. “I definitely ruffled some feathers,” she recalls. Sponsors were shy about supporting someone with such an eco-friendly message (especially if they hadn’t taken steps toward greening their businesses). Motorsports officials didn’t like having their eco-lapses pointed out so publicly. And fans thought she was “some weirdo, vegetarian, hippie girl from California talking about carbon footprints.”

But, she’s gradually been able to gather support for her views in the motorsports world, even as she’s boosted her profile as an activist away from the track. Münter is a frequent speaker at pro-environmental events, and as an ambassador for the National Wildlife Foundation (NWF), she’s lobbied members of Congress on climate change issues.

“Her experience as a professional racecar driver and her passion as an environmentalist bring a unique voice to the conversation about how we develop solutions to global warming,” says NWF communications director Christine Dorsey.
Passion comes easily to Münter, as does a taste for adventure. “I remember when I got my first car — I definitely got a lot of speeding tickets!” says the Rochester, Minn., native. “I’ve always enjoyed pushing the limit, and I’ve always been an adrenaline junkie. Once I got behind the wheel of my first [race] car, I just fell in love with it.”  

To stay in shape for her sport (drivers need to stay in good physical condition to withstand the physical and mental stress of racing), Münter works out regularly. “I like to swim best, but I will scuba dive if I am near the ocean. If I am near snow, I snowboard. I also enjoy tennis and have been taking kickboxing lessons,” she says. “In general, I step up my workout program when I have a race coming up and will exercise every day in preparation.”

With five races on the ARCA circuit in the next four months, Münter will need to stay sharp. Her fans — and the planet — are counting on her. 

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Alice, yesterday, closed the gap to the Championship Lead in the Formula Renault BARC Championship to just 5 points, after taking two solid second place finished at the North Yorkshire circuit of Croft.

After qualifying 5th and 4th on the grid for the races, Alice knew it was all to play for: “We did have a struggle with brake problems in qualifying, but we managed to get it sorted for the race, and I knew I had to get a good start and get ahead of my championship rivals”.

This is exactly what Alice did, by producing excellent starts in both races, to achieve her second place finishes: “I am happy about this weekend’s results, as we have closed the gap dramatically to the lead of the championship. Thanks to my engineer Sarah (engineer and co-owner for Manor Competition), we got the car set how we wanted for the races to battle our way through to second”.

Rounds seven and eight of the 2010 Protyre Formula Renault BARC Championship take place at Norfolk’s Snetterton circuit on 31st July/1st August.

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Touring Car Masters presented by Autobarn driver, Leanne Tander has been nominated as a CAMS representative to the newly created FIA Women & Motor Sport Commission (WMC).

Australia’s most recognisable female racer, Tander was the first woman in the world to win a race in Formula 3, and the first female competitor to stand on a V8 Supercar podium.

Currently a newcomer to the Touring Car Masters in the formidable Wilson Security / McGrath Foundation XA Falcon, Tander is already among the front runners in the series, as her list of accomplishments extends.

After considering a number of very high quality candidates, the Board nominated Tander as the CAMS’ representative to the FIA WMC.

The FIA Women & Motor Sport Commission aims to put in place strategies and policies that will promote education and training, and put into practice actions and events that will strengthen the participation of women in all areas of motor sport.

The Commission will work with the FIA’s sporting and non-sporting commissions and other key international federations on joint sporting projects.

The WMC will also take an active role in international forums and conferences devoted to the place of women in sport, and the advances that can be made.

The Women & Motor Sport Commission comprises 19 members representing the ASN’s, manufacturers, teams, drivers and the Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM).

LEANNE TANDER:

“I’m really excited that I’ve been nominated for this position. It’s is a real passion of mine to encourage more women to be involved in motorsport in whatever capacity; as drivers, engineers or mechanics – anything.

“I’m looking forward to my first meeting and learning more about the role.”

The Touring Car Masters is proudly presented by Autobarn, and supported by Biante Model Cars, Shannons Insurance, Rare Spares and official suppliers Hoosier Tires and Australian Sports Marketing.

www.touringcarmasters.com.au

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WATKINS GLEN, NY (July 4, 2010) – IZOD IndyCar driver Milka Duno finished 23rd in today’s Camping World Grand Prix At The Glen at Watkins Glen International in Watkins Glen, NY.

“We needed a trouble-free race here at Watkins Glen and that’s just what we got,” said Duno. “We were able to have a clean race and to take the checkered flag – and that’s always a great thing. Thanks to the team for working so hard to give me a good car for the race!”

Duno drives the #18 CITGO/CANTV car with Dale Coyne Racing.

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