Now that we’ve decided it’s safe to breathe again and have simmered down about Texas Motor Speedway, after we’ve (literally) picked up the pieces and moved on, it’s time to acknowledge one positive, undeniable fact.
Racing and Twitter go together like peas and carrots. And that’s adorable.
Without the ability to snark it out on social media Saturday night about the wrecktacular Rainguard Water Sealers 600, we’d have nothing better to do than continue life without exhalation. Instead, we could to smile at Wiener* and Hunch* (*not their real names) and ease the tension surrounding a race that cost Verizon IndyCar Series teams an estimated $2 million in damage while scaring the adult beverages out of fans and angering almost everyone involved who wasn’t named Will Power.
That said, we must relive it. It started with James Hinchcliffe, who answered Chip Ganassi’s accusation that Hinch was to blame for a multicar pileup with what became the race’s unofficial motif -- “that’s adorable” – during a live interview on NBCSN. Before the race had ended, it became a meme:
From there, the night evolved or devolved, depending on your perspective, into a comedy of errors and tweets. A certain @der174 called out Hinch (at least, we think that's who he meant) with this:
To which the Mayor of “Hunchtown” replied, as only he could:
And then there was this:
Let’s be honest. This race was a poop sandwich. For whatever reason(s), it disintegrated into a mess. Fans, like drivers, have a range of opinions about Texas Motor Speedway and pack racing: Everything from it’s utterly inappropriate to highly entertaining when done right. Whatever the cause, this one was an airball.
Whether you think it’s more daredevil show than racing or you want to see nothing but ovals on the schedule, there’s no denying that this one didn’t work. Sometimes great golfers miss 2-foot putts, and sometimes great racers create a junkyard.
But, thanks to our ability to pseudo-participate by way of tweets, Saturday’s race transformed into kabuki theater too strange and comical and out of the norm to be believed – or to be ignored. That’s not such a bad thing, is it?
Days afterward, we’re still entertained. In response to this from Ed Carpenter Racing ...
Tony Kanaan’s wife, Lauren, replied ...
… to which Wiener* chimed in ...
… to which Carpenter’s wife, Heather, responded ...
Now that’s adorable.