Got up at 4:30am yesterday to watch the Australian GP (yes I know I’m mad). Glad to see Lewis Hamilton score another win, but was even more impressed by Sebastian Bourdais bringing back markers Torro Rosso up to 4th before his car expired just two laps from the end. And with all the millions F1 team spend preparing for a new season you think they could keep more than six cars running by the end of the race. The retirement rate was approaching farcical.

Having said that the removal of Traction Control has meant they need to be drivers again – well overdue in my opinion. Watching F1 cars slide about like that, and the occasional glorious four wheel drift, took me back to the 1970s and the likes of Ronnie Peterson and James Hunt (Boy that’s showing my age a bit).

On a recent NASCAR broadcast announcer Darrel Walltrip declared that Kyle Busch could “run three wide all by himself.” Meaning the young driver from Las Vegas had the ability to run anywhere on the track, often switching grooves mid corner to find the best line.

Watch Busch in the #51 truck from last weekend’s race in Atlanta for a perfect example.

Over the first four weeks of the season Kyle Busch has been the class of the field in Trucks and the top two NASCAR stock car series. His historic first win for Toyota in the Cup race at Atlanta was the perfect exclamation point on a weekend that saw him lead both Cup and Truck series point standings, win two races, and dominate a third until a blown tire put him out of contention.

It seems that the off season move from Hendricks to Gibbs Racing has given Kyle Busch the opportunity to showcase his raw talent behind the wheel.

Ernie Triplett was the 1931 and 1932 AAA West Coast Champion. Although he was born in the Midwest and did most of his early racing there, he rose to prominence after he started winning at the Legion Ascot Speedway in Los Angeles. He competed in the Indianapolis 500 five times between 1929 and 1933. He failed to finish four times because of mechanical failures. However in 1931 he completed the distance finishing  in seventh place. By 1934 he had semi-retired from the sport and was racing only occasionally.

On March 4th, 1934 he entered a AAA Pacific Coast Big Car Championship race at Imperial Raceway in California. According to reports the track was so dusty that the vision of the drivers was severely impaired. One car, slowed by engine problems, had stopped on the track in the north turn. Another car hit the stationery race car and rolled over on impact. At this point several people from the infield had run onto the track to assist just as Triplett arrived on the scene at speed. Triplett’s car struck and killed a mechanic, and crashed heavily, causing injuries to Triplett that would prove fatal within a few hours.