2010 Homstead-Miami Indy Series Championship Race

Auto racing is very much like life.


Sometimes the best car does not deliver the best results for the most proficient drivers. Other times the best drivers do very well in less than spectacular cars.

A great lesson to keep in mind is that one can never rule out the power of the human will in competitions of any kind. The exercise of will power in human life – or at least in myopic-life as this is lived today – is one of those maxims of the Aesopian moral kind that remains by all accounts one of those well kept secret of how to handle our day-to-day affairs in the world-at-large.


Of course, on some occasions the best and the not so great drivers alike are equally defeated by that pesky thing known as luck. But this is another question altogether.

The 2010 Homestead-Miami Indy Championship race did not disappoint. In fact, the entire race was a nail-biter. Because the point-differential between first and second place was only 12 points leading up to the Friday of qualifying, the race was very much up in the air until the last minute.
Dario Franchitti is the 2010 Indy Series Champion. He continued to demonstrate his dominance in oval-racing. What I found most interesting in this year’s Homestead-Miami race is how the race unfolded. The first five places went as follow: Scott Dixon won the race; 2) Danika Patrick; 3) Tony Kanaan; 4) Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves finished in fifth.


This race had an abundance of drama from beginning to end. Franchitti began the race in the pole position, and eventually led the contest for about 138 laps. Will Power, who was the overall point leader could finish second and still retain his point lead. Unfortunately for Power, he grazed the wall in the notorious turn four of that race track and had to abandon the race due to suspension problems.

For about half the race the fans stood and cheered their favorite driver. Miami native, Tony Kanaan, received many cheers and applause when he challenged the leader. His battle with Danica Patrick in the last fifteen laps or so was truly exhilarating.

Auto racers are by definition no-nonsense individualist who take life by the horns. They are also admirable in that the standards of accountability that they hold themselves to are not as common in other professions as some people like to believe. This comes as the result of having beliefs and convictions that need must be tested in conditions and situations of life and death.


As I have written elsewhere, auto racing is an honest endeavor that brings out some of man’s most powerfully innate abilities; abilities that can never easily be explained away by an intellectualist and materialist popular psychology.