Black flags and curse words and spies, oh my!

By DAVID GREEN

Two winners at Montreal, complete with side-by-side dueling celebratory burnouts. A feud between a television cable channel and a champion from the USAC, IRL and NASCAR ranks. What was billed as a merger turns out to be, in fact, a downsizing.

Indy cars are racing today in what, it appears, will be the last time -- or, anyway, the last time in the foreseeable future -- for them at Michigan International Raceway.

Across the pond in Formula One, an espionage tale that Ian Fleming might have dreamed up and an internal conflict within one of the two teams embroiled in the spy vs. spy brouhaha.

Oh, and don't forget the hurt feelings of drivers Kevin Harvick (Brickyard) and David Reutimann (Raceway Park) after they came out on the short end of a couple of fender-banging battles for victories last weekend in Indianapolis.

Has there ever been a more bizarre period in motor sports than the present?

It would take too long (and my pal Keith "The Chief" Ott hates long-winded blogs) to dissect all these issues, so we'll keep the discussion brief and let the TR.com community have the floor.

The Robby Gordon incident: NASCAR race officials clearly blew their administration of this debacle. Gordon should have been placed in the lead for the restart. Disobeying the black flag was, in a legal sense, entrapment. Purposely or not, NASCAR baited Gordon and he took the bait.

Tony Stewart vs. ESPN: It's not hard to imagine that there's some substance to Stewart's complaints about ESPN. Somebody needs to advise the outspoken driver that all he's doing is sinking to that level and giving them and other media affiliates ammunition to criticize and condemn him.

The Ginn layoffs: The "merger" between Ginn and Dale Earnhardt Inc. has resulted in the loss of about 120 employees. First of all, this is hardly man-bites-dog news. Most mergers result in some people, if none other than management, getting canned.

If this is the first venture by Bobby Ginn that ever resulted in a non-permanent status for some of his employees, he has been successful indeed. I came close to losing my shirt by joining up with an entrepreneurial effort once, and had it in fact gone belly-up, I would've had only myself to blame.

But, if we're going to point fingers at management, let's remember that it's not Bobby Ginn alone who has laid off all those folks. The two companies supposedly merged, remember? DEI is their employer now, too, so let's let them take some responsibility for the reduction in force.

The IRL at MIS: Open-wheel cars were the first to run at the 2-mile track in the Irish Hills of southern Michigan -- in 1968, the season before NASCAR arrived. It's a great venue for Indy cars with a terrific history. Then again, MIS was the site of the ill-fated and even more ill-advised U.S. 500, the anti-Indy 500 race staged in 1996 after the CART-IRL split. Maybe it's just karma.

And, although many NASCAR fans may be oblivious to it, the most bizarre items of all -- the F1 hijinks.

McLaren was found to be in possession of a considerable volume of technical documents belonging to Ferrari, according to an investigation by the World Motor Sport Council -- and yet, there was no punishment handed out for this violation.

McLaren is managing to punish itself, however. At this weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix, one of the team's drivers, Fernando Alonso, was penalized for interfering with his teammate's qualifying effort. It wasn't the team, but rather race stewards, who handed out the punishment, penalizing Alonso five places on the grid. That knocked Alonso off the pole and handed the top starting spot to the teammate, Lewis Hamilton, who went on to win the race.

McLaren's team manager, Ron Dennis, was too emotionally overwrought to take part in Hamilton's victory celebration -- and no need for him to, by the way, since the stewards also decided that McLaren would not receive constructor points for its results at Budapest.

As for any hard feelings between Kevin Harvick and Stewart, or David Reutimann and Jason Leffler, heck -- that's the most normal thing that has happened in racing the past few weeks.