The Driver Suit Blog

By David G. Firestone

So I wanted to discuss this last week, but the column was way too long, so I’ll discuss it here. It was announced that FOX will be purchasing 1/3 of IndyCar from Roger Penske. This will, according to the press release, create:

-Innovative and industry-leading racing and entertainment events

-A hyper-engaged digital strategy and immersive content focus

-Enhanced promotion and star-building opportunities for NTT IndyCar Series drivers

While get what they are trying to do, I kept circling back to one singular question. That question is, given the current viewership numbers, and overall trends, what does FOX think they can accomplish? This isn’t a boom period, the 1990’s are over. IndyCar has made mistake after mistake after mistake during the boom period and since.

When Penske bought IndyCar, I, like many fans, thought this would change IndyCar for the better. A fresh owner would bring fresh changes, and the sport would improve. Not only didn’t anything really improve, but it got worse. The utter disaster that was the two races at Thermal made the sport look really bad. Penske blew many opportunities to bring fans in.

IndyCar moving from NBC to FOX was the best thing that happened in the last few years. NBC has been a joke to racing fans for years. It was so refreshing to watch the Toronto race on a regular tv instead of Peacock. All of the races are on broadcast TV, and ratings are up 31%. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing, but, how long can these ratings raise last? NASCAR’s ratings are down, F1 and the NHRA ratings have plateaued.

This move does have the advantage of injecting cash into IndyCar, but, again, how long can this last? FOX and IndyCar are for-profit businesses. As such, they need to make money to survive. This will work for a short while, but the fact that the fans are gone will affect things going forward. This partnership will work for a while, but FOX might sell their stake sooner rather than later.

The fan bases of racing are slowly going down. F1 and the NHRA have a very stable fan base, and they aren’t really doing badly. NASCAR has burned so many of their long-time fans, that they’ve left. IndyCar spent 35 years making the worst decisions at the worst times. Bottom line here is that this deal sounds good, but let’s see how long this lasts. Now, on to Randy Couture’s Pro Mod crash. According to TMZ:

“UFC legend Randy Couture was airlifted to a burn center with serious injuries after crashing during practice runs at a racetrack in Kansas City … TMZ Sports has learned.

Couture — who was slated to make his National Hot Rod Association racing debut this year — was involved in an accident during preparation on Tuesday … resulting in first- and second-degree burns, trauma injuries and smoke inhalation.”

Now, before we get to my Uni-Watch comment, let’s get technical and discuss the NHRA uniform requirements for Pro-Mod

NHRA Pro Mod Firesuit requirements, NHRA rule book Section 6, page 12. PDF page 166. The following items are required for all NHRA Pro Mod drivers to wear.

-One Piece driver’s suit meeting SFI Spec 3.2A/20(1)(3)

-SFI Spec 3.3/20 gloves(2)(3)

-SFI Spec 3.3/20 boots

-SFI 3.3 head sock or SFI 3.3 skirted helmet is required on all cars.

-Fresh-air breathing system mandatory.

-Glove under-liners made of flame retardant material and socks meeting SFI 3.3 mandatory.

-All clothing containing metal or plastic prohibited.

-Undergarments that are worn in addition to those mandated that are made of flammable materials (e.g. nylon, rayon, polyester,spandex, etc.) are prohibited.

-All jewelry prohibited, with the exception of a high temperature rated silicone wedding band.

NOTE 1: SFI Spec 3.2A refers to SFI Spec 3.2A, which is the SFI standard for firesuits.

NOTE 2: SFI Spec 3.3 refers to SFI Spec 3.3, which covers all other Driver Accessories. These include gloves, underclothing, hoods, socks,shoes and boots,helmet supports,harness pads,arm restraints,helmet skirts and sports bras.

Note 3: SFI 3.2A/20 and SFI 3.3/20 are rated to protect the wearer from second degree burns for 45 seconds. These suits have up to seven layers. A typical NASCAR Cup Series or IndyCar Series driver suit is rated SFI 3.2A/5, is rated to protect the wearer from second degree burns for 10 second and has three layers.

Now I’m going to repeat what I said on Uni-Watch about the situation:

“My feeling is that one of two things, if not both, happened. Either he was not wearing the appropriate rated suit (since this is practice, the rules might not be as rigidly enforced) or since this was practice, a full safety team may not have been in place during the run in question. Safety officials were on scene, but not as much as a full race weekend. Since Pro Mod cars can reach speeds over 270MPH in a matter of just under six seconds, if something were to occur with one or both of these scenarios, it could easily lead to what happened.”

With that, It’s also possible that it was just an accident, and even with all of the saftey systems in place, it still caused the damage. Auto racing is an inherently dangerous sport, and accidents happen. Randy is up and about, and he is still preparing to debut in Pro Mod sometime in 2025. That is a good thing.

Next week, unless something major happens, how I spent my summer vacation.

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By David G. Firestone

I was going to do a “how I spent my summer vacation” column this week, but events transpired that I need to discuss. The first, and most obvious, is the fact that the Chicago Street Race will not be coming back in 2026. Instead, San Diego got a street race, and Chicago’s place on the NASCAR calendar moving forward has yet to be determined.

I can say a lot, but I can’t say that I’m shocked. While it proved decently popular with NASCAR and many of their fans, it wasn’t popular with Chicago residents. Many people were pissed that the Taste of Chicago got moved to August, and many more who live and work in Downtown Chicago were pissed at street closures. All in all, this was inevitable, and I’m not sure it will come back. Given how it came to be in the first place, this isn’t shocking.

Second news story is the Shawn Reed crash. At Seattle, Reed suffered a crash as a result of a blown tire. As a result, Reed suffered a hand injury, damaged thumb, the loss of his left index finger and broken ribs. Reed has stated he plans to make a comeback. He also discussed the tire in question. To quote Autoweek.com, link at the bottom, according to Reed:

“Goodyear’s reached out and they’ve found about 99% of the tire. They took some time and picked up every single piece—and that thing was bagged up and sent back to their home office in Akron where they’re dissecting everything. I’m not going to speculate. We do the best we can with what we’ve got, and they’re trying to put out the best tires. These cars are exceeding speeds today and forces that they probably never even thought about 10 years ago.

Whether that tire came apart or whether something went through it, we’ just have to work toward making them better. If we find that something went through it, we have to find what went through it and work on keeping it attached to the car. If it’s a freak accident and something blew up and something broke, then we have to find a better way to attach that stuff. That’s all I’m after and I think that’s what most racers are after.”

My thoughts and prayers to Shawn Reed.

Now for my most controversial story, the death of Hulk Hogan. On July 24, 2025, Terry Gene Bolea, known to the wrestling world as Hulk Hogan passed away. This let people into one of two camps. Camp #1 is the camp that remembers Hulk for all the good work he did in the ring. Camp #2 reviles Hulk for the who he is as a person. I’m firmly in camp #2.

It’s 2025, we have to stop separating the art from the artist. We can’t just judge things based on how successful they are anymore. We have to accept that a lot of celebrities are terrible people at their core. Hogan has a decades’ long list of confirmed examples of being a terrible person. He died on the 24th, but look at what people were saying about him on the 23rd.

In a Slate article, Luke Winkie made my point better than I ever could. In an artilce titled “Everyone Hated Hulk Hogan,” Luke stated the following, link at the bottom:

“Why do people despise Hogan? You need simply look at the cavalcade of hurt feelings and callous double-crosses he left in his wake. In a career spanning half a century, the man developed a genuinely Jay Leno–like reputation for the viciousness in which he protected his top spot in World Wrestling Entertainment. His ego frequently degraded the product itself.

There are too many stories to recall here, and all of them require a certain fluency with pro-wrestling customs, but I’ll try to distill a few highlights in layman’s terms. For instance: In 1993 Hogan outmaneuvered Bret Hart—another one of the greatest wrestlers of all time—by persuading company Chairman Vince McMahon to alter the ending of WrestleMania IX at the last minute. Instead of Hart defending his title in the main event, Hogan snatched the belt back on an anticlimactic technicality. Hulk paraded around the gold for the last few months he had left on his contract, in a farewell tour only he seemed to want. Hart never forgave him.

An even weirder incident occurred four years later, when Hogan was working for WWE’s rival wrestling promotion WCW. He was playing a bad guy at this point in his career, and he was booked to wrestle the beloved babyface Sting. It was, legitimately, the most anticipated match of its era, and the company cloaked it in all sorts of soap-opera pageantry. The storyline, heading into the match, was that Hogan had skewed the rules to his favor with a crooked referee named Nick Patrick. Patrick was supposed to execute what is known in the industry as a “fast three count.” When Hogan pinned Sting, Patrick would pound the mat as fast as possible to award Hogan the victory—thus ditching the impartial cadence enforced by the imaginary rulebook. It would demonstrate to the crowd, in no uncertain terms, that its hero had been screwed out of his rightful victory.

The one problem? When the match reached its climax, Patrick didn’t perform a fast three count after all. There are conflicting reports on why, but years later Patrick alleged that Hogan was the one to call the audible. At his most ruthless, it could often seem like Hogan believed wrestling to be real.

To be fair, he was not alone in that distinction. Pro wrestling has always been a cutthroat institution and, historically speaking, has favored its most cold-blooded operators (Shawn Michaels, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and even the Rock all come to mind). But Hogan’s crimes had a nasty way of escaping the fantasia of the ring.

In 1986 Hogan committed perhaps his greatest sin, when he scuttled a burgeoning unionization effort in the WWE. The labor action was led by future Minnesota Gov. Jesse “the Body” Ventura. He planned to organize a wildcat strike in the days before WrestleMania II, when the performers had maximum leverage. (Health care and retirement benefits were among his core demands.) After Hogan caught wind of the effort, he took it straight to McMahon, who subsequently threatened to fire any wrestler involved in the effort. Just like Hart, Ventura never made amends with Hogan, who characterized what he did as a betrayal. To this day, WWE wrestlers lack a union.

I could go on. Hogan was the vessel for one of Peter Thiel’s first forays into political donorship, when the tech baron dumped oodles of cash into a lawsuit that brought about the destruction of Gawker Media. Hogan was suing the publication ostensibly because it had published his sex tape, on which he uttered racial slurs, specifically about the Black man his daughter Brooke was dating. In reality, it seemed clear he was Thiel’s willing partner to take down a longtime foe. Still, the slurs got him briefly booted out of the WWE, and when the company reinstated him in 2018, he offered a half-hearted mea culpa to the wrestlers backstage. According to those present, Hogan began his apology by warning the roster to be mindful about being recorded without their knowledge, rather than addressing the charges head-on. A group of prominent Black wrestlers eventually released a statement about the meeting, asserting that they’d need to see Hogan make a “genuine effort to change” if he were to gain their trust again. (It is safe to say that that never happened.)

So this is where we leave Hogan—a conniving and sadistically opportunistic person who is, nonetheless, permanently sanctified in the canon. I’m sure if you had the chance to ask him, he’d contend that all of those qualities were vital to his success, that it is impossible to scale the oily theogony of pro-wrestling immortality without making a gallery of enemies, both on-screen and off. The trade-off? Unlike so many of his peers, Hogan never did earn a beatific final chapter. Nobody came to kiss the ring. Those glory years in the 1980s, when Hulkamania truly ran wild, have been completely overshadowed by his cruelty. Toward what we now know was the end of his life, fellow legends seemed to take special pleasure in offering parting potshots. Just days ago, I listened to the Undertaker give his opinion on the hellish reception Hogan received in Los Angeles: “Sometimes in life, things come back.”

In the end, Hogan’s life and career in the ring will forever be overshadowed by who he was as a person. Why should we overlook a life of a Racist, greedy, backstabbing, untrustworthy, selfish, narcissistic entitled shill because he could cut good promos and wrestled well enough? Why should we separate Hulk Hogan from Terry Bolea? Granted there are wrestlers who were worse, but they don’t deserve praise either.

The bottom line here is that who you are off screen will be judged as harshley as you are on screen. Hulk Hogan is another example of bad behaviour behind the scenes tarnishes a legacy. Hogan isn’t the first, he isn’t the worst, he won’t be the last, but he is a perfect example.

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