Paul Tracy, Scott Maxwell inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame

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On tap this week:

• Maxwell gets his due
• No news on Honda Indy
• Chase down to 12
• Mansell learns the rules
• Quote of the Week: Wickens unhappy
• #F1discovershashtags

Ask anyone in the Canadian racing world and they'll tell you that Scott Maxwell never got his due.

The veteran driver has won just about every sports car race that matters, taking class victories in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, 12 Hours or Sebring, and the Rolex 24 in Daytona.

Unfortunately, Maxwell came up through the ranks at the same time as Paul Tracy, a brash, spectacular, and often controversial driver who made headlines wherever he went and pretty much overshadowed every other racer in the country.

Although he toiled in the shadows as he carved out a successful career behind the wheel, don't think for a second that Maxwell wishes things were different.

"When it was all happening I would say I was envious, but after Paul started winning at the Indy Lights level and I knew didn't have the resources to get there, I was his biggest fan," said Maxwell who was inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame (CMHF) on Saturday in Toronto.

"I don't regret any of it looking back now and to come back here with Paul tonight and being with our families is great."

A promising racer with Formula Vee and Formula Ford titles under his belt, Maxell simply didn't have the resources to get a ride in the main feeder series at the time, Indy Lights, and rise to IndyCar.

When he reached his early 20s, the Toronto driver knew he needed to start making a living and sports car racing beckoned. Titles in Canadian National Showroom Stock and Grand-Am Cup followed, along with the class wins in the world's biggest endurance events, including the first ever Daytona Prototype win in the Rolex 24.

In a classy move, fellow inductee Tracy made a point to single out Maxwell in his acceptance speech and express how proud he was to be going into the CMHF alongside his old friend and rival.

Random Thoughts: After news of an IndyCar inspection of Canadian Tire Motorsport Park (CTMP) last month sparked a flurry of speculation that the legendary track would host next year's Honda Indy, things have grown quiet.

That could mean one of two things: Either there's a deal to race at Bowmanville, Ont.'s, CTMP and the organizers are getting ready to announce something, or things are moving closer to a deal to run the Honda Indy at its usual Exhibition Place venue.

IndyCar can't run on its usual mid-July date in Toronto next year due to the Pan-American Games being in town and using the race's Exhibition Place site. The athletics start on July 10 and wrap up Aug. 15 with the closing ceremonies for the Parapan American Games.

Taking athlete arrival and pre-games preparations into account, the latest date the race could probably run is June 28, but that would be cutting it close and it's doubtful the city would want to have the Indy in town less than two weeks before the games get going. The first weekend in June is out because the series is racing in Texas, so that leaves June 12-14 or 19-21 as possible dates downtown.

Both those weekends would sound reasonable if they didn't come right after the annual Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, which goes June 7. Expecting IndyCar to complete head-to-head with Formula One is folly at best and holding the Exhibition Place event a week or two after the grand prix in Montreal would be a poorly thought out move for the race and the series.

Even if it's only for one year, keeping the mid-July date and trucking the cars an hour down the road to Bowmanville would be a better solution.

By the Numbers: And then there were 12. With the first knockout round of the new format Chase for the Cup in the books, a dozen NASCAR drivers are left in the running for the 2014 title.

After the Penske pair of Joey Logano and 2012 titlist Brad Keselowski got the automatic berth in the second knockout round with wins in the first two Chase races, four-time champion Jeff Gordon advanced with a win on Sunday in the AAA 400 at the Dover International Speedway.

On the other end of the spectrum, the four drivers at the bottom of the points among the 16 original Chase qualifiers got dropped for the next three-race round.

Gordon, who has been strong all year, is looking for his fifth NASCAR title.

"Oh, I think this is huge," he said after the win.

"It wasn't about the points – it wasn't about just squeezing by to get to the next round – it was about making a statement. I don't know how you make a bigger statement than what this team just did right there."

Five time champion Jimmie Johnson also advanced along with two other former title winners, Matt Kenseth and Kevin Harvick.

The unsuccessful drivers were A.J. Allmendinger, Kurt Busch, Greg Biffle and Aric Almirola.

The next three-race knockout round begins with the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway on Oct. 5.

Technically Speaking: In his acceptance speech as the international inductee into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame on Saturday, 1992 F1 world champion Nigel Mansell entertained the crowd with several stories from his long and illustrious racing career.

One tale that stood out involved the final race of the 1986 season in Australia where a blown tire snatched the title from the Englishman and handed it to rival Alain Prost.

Mansell's championship bid ended 17 laps from the end when his left rear tire exploded at about 320 kilometres per hour as he powered down the long Brabham Straight on the Adelaide street circuit. The Williams driver then showed miraculous car control as he brought his stricken racer to a stop without hitting anything.

Later, one of the race officials lamented to Mansell that it was too bad he kept the bucking bronco from slamming into one of the concrete walls lining the circuit. When Mansell looked at him sideways, the steward explained that a crash into the wall would have seen the race red-flagged for debris on the circuit and because more than two-thirds distance was done, they probably would have simply called it a day.

The final results would be taken from the last lap completed and that would have made the popular English driver the 1986 world champion.

Mansell said he learned a valuable lesson that day.

"When your tire blows at more than 200 miles per hour, the first thing you need to do is pull out the rulebook," he said flipping imaginary pages.

Quote of the Week: "I don't understand what some other drivers were doing out there. There are always drivers who you can have a fair race with and still preserve the fun element. Then there are the others who drive into the side of your car when you're braking and cause you to spin like [Audi's Miguel] Molina did with me. I don't understand why he did that – I had the corner, I had the position."

– Canadian Robert Wickens after being spun in the late stages of the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters race at the Zandvoort Circuit. Wickens was climbing through the field and looked to be on his way to a top finish before the incident with the Audi driver. The Guelph, Ont., driver ended the day eighth.

The Last Word: Apparently Formula One's commercial arm and its boss Bernie Ecclestone have finally decided to embrace social media.

Formula One Management's (FOM) included a Twitter hashtag and a message to join the conversation in its Singapore Grand Prix television feed, a move hailed as a giant breakthrough for the sport by many F1 commentators.

Considering that Ecclestone has eschewed all forms of social media and FOM's approach has been mostly litigious in the area, having hashtags definitely pushes F1 in the right direction.

On the other hand, F1's social media initiatives also need to be put in perspective.

Two days after F1's commercial arm discovered hashtags, NASCAR announced a partnership with YouTube that will see complete replays of all Chase for the Cup races uploaded to its channel and available for fans.

And, NASCAR's social media engagement cruised well beyond simply creating hashtags for individual races long ago. Its Fan and Media Engagement Center has been up and running since the beginning of last year and monitors social media traffic and gets into the conversation online. That's probably why NASCAR out-tweets F1's official feed by roughly 840 monthly and has almost twice the Twitter followers despite being U.S.-based and not global. They have both been on Twitter since mid-2009.

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