We went up to get the cheap $40 tickets from the box office but luckily a guy sold us really nice seats for $25 each! (They were complimentary tickets up 24 rows in section 9).

At noon, we headed in to catch the Infiniti Pro Series race.

Here is a shot I took looking over the back of the stands.

Here's the view to my left:

Here's the view to my right:

Here is an award stage the IRL had setup prior to the races.

As I had heard, if you sit above row 15 here at Michigan, you can see all the way around the 2-mile oval! Its easy to follow the races. At Indy, you're lucky if you can see 1/2 to 1/4 of the race. The IPS race was good with an average speed of 171 mph. Drivers Medeiros and Chesson swapped places back and forth throughout the race for first place. PJ Chesson had the lead on the final lap and won the race. While Medeiros has been the dominant force in the IPS all year, Chesson just recently came over after running WoO Sprints. I think we could see them both in the IRL in the near future.

After watching F1 guys struggle to do a 360 burnout on tv, I was surprised to see PJ whipping his car around and doing a bunch of 180 and 360's. Cool!

It was a sunny day without a cloud in the sky and the temperature was in the mid-80's. The IRL race wasn't going to start for another couple of hours, so most people headed down below the stands to get in some shade. We decided to head out to the parking lot. We sat in our cars with the A/C running for awhile. During this time we got to witness an airshow by a 1-prop airplane. This guy was diving and going upside down and twisting around for a long time. It was amazing.

We returned to our seats in time for the pre-race festivities. For some reason, they had a Canadian Flag hung up next to the American flag. A girl sang the Canadian National Anthem, and then ours. Weird. I wonder why they did that?

This old silver airplane flew over afterwards.

Also some parachutist came down with large flags.

Once the race started, it didn't start. The starter made the pack go around 2 extra laps until they were in proper alignment before he'd give them the green flag.

The race was tight and exciting and no one hit the wall the entire 400 miles, although there was some bumping going on amoung the drivers. The flagman spent nearly the entire race waving the passing flag; it appeared, at Scheckter and Rice. At one point, Helio Castroneves finally got in front of his teammate, but then ran his front wing into the back tire of Vito Meira's rear tire. This flattened Meira's tire and a piece of Castroneve's wing flew up and landed on the fence infront of us. E.T. went down and offered to climb the fence to retrieve it, but the officials declined his generous offer :-)

There was a real problem with the pitstops in this race. First, when Tomas Sheckter was coming in to pit, Tora Takagi took off out of his pit too soon and hit him. This sent Scheckter nose first right into his pit wall. He hit his vent and jack operator, Steve Namisnak, breaking his right leg. Scheckter appeared to have the fastest car at the track... and about the worst luck. He came into the pits right before a yellow came out that cost him a lap. He also ran out of gas on lap 155. It was rather strange seeing him battle with the leader, Tony Kanaan, but not for first place - just to get back on the lead lap! I couldn't understand either how his yellow Panther Chevy-powered car was so fast when every other Chevy in the field was far behind the Hondas and Toyota-powered cars.

Adrian Fernandez also had a lot of bad luck. He locked up his wheels when entering the pits and did a 180 degree turn into his pit and hit his pit member, Rhrodi Griffiths. He was not badly hurt and continued at his job.

Later in the pits, he hit Vitor Meira, which sent him into Dan Wheldon's tire changer who was working on Wheldon's car. It looked like it hurt, but Mike Horvath punched Meira's wing, got up and continued to work the day. Fernandez got punished with a stop-and-go penalty.

Tony Kanaan had the pole position and led the entire race until lap 190.

With 10 laps to go, Buddy Rice passed him and held on for the win! Rice had been on Kanaan's tail most of the day. Rice had a bad pitstop though on lap 112 that sent him to the middle of the pack, but he quickly worked his way back to the front. After being so dominant during the race, Kanaan was very upset at his 2nd place finish. He said he was following team orders to let Rice by, apparently to save gas. Kanaan tried hard to take the lead back and this led to a close finish.

The post-race awards:

Back in the parking lot, we positioned our lawnchairs close to my car to try to get some shade. The traffic wasn't moving. After an hour or so we went to find some food. The track was closed and the vendors shutdown, but I found some workers who were exiting with a box of food and they gave me some cheeseburgers.

I was really lucky I had drinks and ice left because hardly anyone else did and it was very hot out.

I heard the traffic getting out would be bad, but this was ridiculous. Two hours went by and no one was moving. Koz was looking around and thought if we went up toward the north end of the track, that we could get out. We tried it and found a slow moving line that soon got us on our way home. Yea Koz!

I would definately like to come back for this race again!!