Rest. In. Peace.

A moment of silence, please, for a fellow IndyCar site. MoneyCJ at So. Damn. Indy. has rounded up his beer, his F-bombs and his Jamie Little infatuation and hung up his keyboard, citing a lack of time to pound out posts. I don’t want to make this sound like a eulogy because I personally hope he reacquires the time to return at some point in the future, but I do want to express how much my site owes to him.

A few months after starting My Name Is IRL last season I was starting to get bored and felt like I was pretty much talking to myself – which statistically speaking I likely was. But after seeing the excitement of SDI I started getting fired up again and the posts became not just more frequent but with a little more focus.

Then last July both of our sites got a whole lot of hits after I linked to his story about Danica Patrick’s departure from RLR to AGR. It was kind of a fluke that he heard about it, and at the time many readers probably figured he was making it up. I mean, how is some guy with a blog like that going to scoop all the beat reporters out there? The truth is he happened to hear about the switch from an associate affiliated with one of her sponsors, and when he broke the news hours before a broadcaster in Indianapolis did it effectively handed an audience to both of our sites.

My Name Is IRL will always be indebted to SDI for that moment, for the live-blogging exchanges during races last year, and for exemplifying better than any other site the two-arms-raised-in-the-air-and-screaming excitement of Indy racing. Dude, respect.