IRL Fears Anti-Pig Movement Among Drivers

Note to the slow: below is all (at least mostly) fiction.

Indy Racing League officials Friday worried that fewer and fewer people in the world were willing to drive race cars that have virtually no chance of winning.

A decline in the demand among drivers for ill-handling, under-funded, just-plain-bad cars -- known in the business as "pigs" -- could greatly damage the league's ability to put more than 10 cars on the track at any given time.

"If people start refusing to drive pigs, we'll have kiosks at the mall with signs that say 'Ever think of driving an Indy Car?' that let people fill out driver employment applications online. It won't be pretty."

Speaking of pretty, IRL Rookie of the Year Sensation Danica Patrick (5-1, 100 pounds) is among the latest to express her desire to be in a car that has a reasonable chance of winning. Patrick's contract with her current team, Rahal Letterman Racing, is up at the end of the season and she's looking for a new ride that doesn't have two boat anchors dragging behind it.

"My biggest thing in everything is that I want to win, and I don't care who it's with," Patrick said in an actual article by the Associated Press on July 13. "I just want people that are going to give me the opportunity and spend every last dollar they have to make the car go faster and every last second they have on making it faster."

Patrick isn't the only driver who is unwilling to drive cars with no shot at winning. Fellow female Sarah Fisher, who isn't even in the league any more and whose racing career is at a standstill, reportedly turned down a ride in a pig of a car for the Indy 500. Fisher reportedly saw no career gain in getting in a car that, even with God himself driving, would finish five laps down. And as an added bonus, Fisher would get treated to a week of physical comparisons between her and Danica.

Driver Patrick Carpentier also declined a ride for the 500 saying he thought he should actually get paid to drive, rather than the other way round. Typically, the honor of driving a pig in the back of the 500 field goes to the drivers who can bring the most sponsor or personal cash with them.

More and more drivers also seem reluctant to drive pig cars out on the ragged edge -- thereby risking physical injury -- order to finish 12th out of 18 cars. "Risking putting it into the wall by driving out of your mind in order to get 11th? Um, no thanks," said one driver who asked not to be named.

"It's a very worrying trend," said Archie Debriscatcher, Director of "Competition" for the IRL. "If we rule out the cars that have no shot at winning, we're left with about six, maybe eight cars in the field. Kind of a sellers' market for those rides, but for the rest, we're approaching 'warm-body' level.

Debriscatcher did point out that a lot of teams are doing just what Danica asked -- spending every last dollar on the car -- but the problem is they only have roughly $247 dollars to spend. "They spend all 247 of them on making the car go fast, though."

In other news, industry insiders speculated that a Bridgestone Presents the Champ Car World Series Powered by Ford (BPCCWSPF) decision not to race at the Milwaukee Mile in 2007 was prompted by a threatened class action lawsuit by fans who attended the 2006 race there.

According to rumor, some 2,738 fans were contemplating filing a "false imprisonment" charge against the BPCCWSPF for making them endure a timed oval race that featured one car lapping the field and extended cautions for no apparent reason.