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Happy greatest day in motorsports! :-)

In just a couple of hours, the lights will go out (and away we'll go) at Monaco. It's a very old street race run mostly through the streets of Monte Carlo in quite possibly the most spectacular setting in all of motorsports (apologies to Singapore). Many of you probably associate me mostly with NASCAR, but the first race I ever watched was an old Monaco Grand Prix.

Monaco almost wasn't on the Formula 1 schedule this year because of a dispute with the Automobile Club of Monaco about negotiating a new contract for the race. I can't imagine an F1 schedule without Monaco on the schedule, a race that predates F1 and was first run in 1929.

This is a race that's not the most entertaining for fans because the race cars have become wider over time, and overtaking is extremely difficult in the narrow streets. For the drivers, it's a very fun track because the close proximity of the barriers around the track makes it a very technical circuit. Racing at Monaco is usually best in the rain, where it's much easier to overtake at several points around the circuit. You know that it's a classic circuit when all of the turns have unique names like Sainte Devote, Beau Rivage, Massenet, and many others. Sainte Devote is named for a small chapel near the first turn named for Saint Devota, the patron saint of Monaco. Many of the other turns have interesting stories to them, too.

By the way, for anyone who says Monaco is boring, that means you missed the qualifying session on Saturday. I can't think of a track in motorsports where qualifying is more important, and Q3 was as good as it gets.

A couple of hours after Monaco is the 107th running of the Indianapolis 500. It's run on a 2.5 mile "oval" that's really a rectangle with rounded corners and used to be covered entirely with bricks. Despite being known as the brickyard, almost none of the original bricks remain, with the exception of the start/finish line. Although F1 doesn't run on ovals in the present day, the Indy 500 was an F1 points race from 1950 to 1960.

Many modern NASCAR ovals have turns 1-4 even though there are really only two distinct turns, one at each end of the track. Indianapolis Motor Speedway is partly to blame for this, and it really does have four distinct turns. Darlington Raceway was built a few decades later and wanted to be the Indianapolis of the South, including copying the terminology of turns 1-4. Darlington is more of a typical NASCAR oval with two distinct turns, one at each end, but after copying Indy, the use of turns 1-4 became standard throughout NASCAR.

The Indy 500 is one of two races that calls itself the Great American Race, the other being the Daytona 500. It's a classic race, even older than Monaco, changing over the decades as the bricks were paved over and the cars became much faster. It's a test of drivers' endurance, with 200 laps run at incredibly high speeds. Ever wonder why the cars snake all over the backstretch and frontstretch? The draft is powerful at Indy, so the cars swerve through the straights to try to break the draft for the cars behind them. Not only do the drivers have to negotiate the track, but they have to pay careful attention to any cars behind them that might be in their slipstream. At the end of the 200 laps, the winner gets their face added to the Borg-Warner Trophy and receives a bottle of milk.

In the evening, the Coca-Cola 600 is NASCAR's longest race, run on the 1.5 mile oval at Charlotte Motor Speedway. There's rain in the forecast for most of the Carolinas today, so there's a pretty good chance this race will be postponed to Monday afternoon and evening. It's a test of endurance, with 400 laps around the oval, starting late in the afternoon and finishing up well into the night. The changing track conditions present quite a challenge, because cars that run well when the track is hot may not be the best cars as the track cools during the evening. It might look like any other 1.5 mile oval, but the rough surface of the track and the bumps make this track quite challenging for the drivers. Last year's race was a true test of endurance with many cautions due to tire issues and a couple of big wrecks.

I'm not betting on the Coca-Cola 600 running today because there's an extratropical low spinning along the coast of the Carolinas and producing quite a lot of rain across much of North Carolina. I remain hopeful that the weather will clear long enough to dry the track and get in 400 laps of racing this evening, but I sure wouldn't bet on it. More likely than not, the Xfinity series race will be run Monday afternoon and the Coca-Cola 600 will be Monday evening. If only we could send the rain from Charlotte to Monaco, it would be perfect.

Anyway, there's a lot more I could say about these three classic races, but I'd never get it finsihed before the lights go out at Monaco. If you're going to watch all three races like I am, I'll just strongly encourage you to... reach up there and pull those belts tight one more time!