Hot News & Press from
Doran Racing
Rolex Drivers Share Thoughts on Halloween
Before Sunday's Season Finale at Fontana
FONTANA,
Calif., Oct. 26 - With the international flavor of the
Grand
American Rolex series, differences in language, cuisine
and customs often crop up.
One
such time will be on Sunday, when the series' season finale
at California
Speedway falls on Halloween, one of America's most popular
holidays.
When
several Rolex series drivers were asked for their favorite
Halloween
memories, the answers varied across the board. It seems
that a holiday featuring
jack-o-lanterns, witches, ghosts, skeletons, parades and
trick-or-treating is
not universal.
Forest
Barber of Fort Worth, one of the winning drivers of the
Bell
Motorsports/Feeds the Need Racing Kodak EasyShare DORAN
JE4 Pontiac No. 54 at this
year's Rolex 24 at Daytona, has two young daughters who
enjoy dressing up in
costumes for Halloween.
"Mary,
who is 8, is going as a princess this year, and Ally [Alexandra],
who
is 9, is going as an angel," Barber noted, adding
"Quite apropos!"
Barber
is delaying his trip to Fontana so he can participate
in a Halloween
parade that the school the girls attend will hold on Friday.
"I
have a terrific 'Jack Skellington' costume from Tim Burton's
'A Nightmare
Before Christmas' that I will be wearing in the parade,"
Barber added. "It
will be a lot of fun. Halloween is a lot of fun. The hard
part is resisting the
urge to go through my girls' candy bags and sample the
'good stuff.'"
Christian
Fittipaldi, a native of Sao Paulo, Brazil who lives in
Key
Biscayne, Fla., will co-drive Barber's Kodak EasyShare
car with Terry Borcheller of
Gainesville, Ga., in Sunday's Lexus Grand American 400.
The race will be
televised live on SPEED beginning at 4 p.m. Eastern. The
two-hour-and-45-minute
event starts at 1 p.m. local time, and will be over in
plenty of time for
Halloween night festivities.
"Unfortunately
we don't celebrate Halloween in Brazil," Fittipaldi
explained,
but he likes the concept. "If I had to choose a costume,
it probably would
be all black, but with no weird masks and so on,"
he said.
Like
Barber, Doran-Lista Racing driver Didier Theys has two
young daughters
who are excited about Halloween. Theys is a native of
Nivelles, Belgium who
has lived in Scottsdale, Ariz. for many years.
"For
some reason I never seem to be home for Halloween,"
he noted. "I've
always been traveling for some reason, like I'll be doing
again this year.
"Halloween
is starting to catch on in Europe, but it's not as much
fun as it
is here in the States," he added. "It's growing
in popularity slowly. The
next day, Nov. 1, is the Day of the Dead there, which
is a day of mourning for
people who have recently lost loved ones," he explained.
"It's a solemn day,
and not a party like it is here. But Halloween is growing
slowly in Europe."
Theys'
co-driver in the Doran-Lista DORAN JE4 Lexus No. 27, Jan
Magnussen of
Roskilde, Denmark, concurred.
"Halloween
is starting to catch on in Denmark, but it will be a few
years
before it is as big there as it is in the United States,"
he said.
"I've
been in the States at Halloween before, and really enjoyed
it,"
Magnussen added. "I like the costumes and the way
people do up their houses. It will
be fun to be in California this year at Halloween to see
it."
Fredy
Lienhard Sr., another one of Doran-Lista's drivers and
the father of
the Doran-Lista driver who won here at Fontana in 2002
with Theys, said the same
thing holds true for his native Switzerland.
"Halloween
is becoming popular now also in Switzerland, but just
years ago it
was not known," said Lienhard, of Niederteufen. "Now
the younger families
are celebrating Halloween, quite similar to the way they
do in the United
States."
Andy
Lally of Northport, N.Y. and Dacula, Ga., (yes, that's
Dacula, not
Dracula) and an American through and through, said he
has some interesting
Halloween tales but he wouldn't disclose them.
"My
favorite Halloween stories wouldn't be printable,"
said Lally, who is the
co-points leader in the Rolex series' Super Grand Sport
(SGS) class with his
TPC Racing co-driver, Marc Bunting of Monkton, Md.
"The
others are pretty boring," added Lally, who also
drives for Team Lexus
in Grand-Am Cup. That series will hold a companion event
to Sunday's Rolex
series headliner on Saturday at 2 p.m.
One
of his friends and fellow drivers, Spencer Pumpelly of
Mason Neck, Va.,
thought of a tale he could tell. Pumpelly has been driving
for TPC Racing in
the Rolex series' SGS class and for G&W Motorsports
in the Grand Touring (GT)
class this year, as well as piloting a Race Prep Motorsports
Porsche in the
Grand-Am Cup series.
"Of
course in college I waited until the last minute to get
a costume, and
ended up going as - you guessed it - a race car driver,"
Pumpelly related. "It
seemed like a good idea at the time, but it wasn't too
many beers into the
night (or was it too many beers?) before one of my friends
came to the
realization that I was wearing fireproof clothing.
"You
can guess what happened next," he continued. "A
little WD-40 and a
match, and I was the walking fireball, at least for 3
seconds before it got really
hot and hard to put out.
"I
didn't have any hair on my arm for several weeks, and
I learned that just
because you're not burned it doesn't mean that it wasn't
hot," he added with a
smile.
"Hopefully
my favorite Halloween story will come from the Fontana
race and
the trip to Vegas that night for the awards party the
next day," Pumpelly added.
"The real question is what are Andy [Lally] and Mike
[Johnson, TPC Racing's
team manager] and I going as? The three amigos comes to
mind."
One
PR representative and journalist who covers the Rolex
circuit and wants
to remain anonymous recalled a rather unique costume from
a Halloween past.
"Nick
Fornoro Jr., a midget and supermodified driver, and his
wife always go
all-out for Halloween with a huge party at their home
in Pennsylvania," she
recalled. "One year I went to that as a bag of jellybeans.
I taped together
clear plastic dry-cleaning bags to form the bag, which
went from my neck to my
legs. I used colorful round balloons as the jellybeans.
A big bow around my
neck completed the ensemble.
"It
was a great costume because it cost next to nothing and
I was broke at
the time," she added. "The only negative was
that I couldn't sit down without
breaking a jellybean or two."
California
Speedway and the Rolex series drivers plan to get into
the
Halloween spirit in at least one way this weekend. The
track intends to have a
special Halloween treat available to children on a first-come,
first-served basis
at the end of the line at a special autograph session
Saturday from 11:30 a.m.
to 12:30 p.m. The autograph session is tentatively slated
to be held near the
VIP motorcoach area, east of the water tower, although
fans should listen for
public address system announcements for the most current
information.
For
more information on the Kodak EasyShare team, see
www.feedstheneedracing.com. For more information on the
Doran-Lista team, see www.doranracing.com.
Series news can be obtained at www.grandamerican.com,
while tickets and other
information can be obtained on the track's Web site at
www.californiaspeedway.com.
|