Say My Name

Thank you all for the entertaining suggestions, and I'm glad to see you have as much fun with these as I do. Here are the winners, and we expect the ESPN and IMS Radio people to adopt these immediately...right!

Jay “Hot Rod” Howard – Not only because it invokes the Rod Stewart vibe, but also because every sporting series needs a guy nicknamed “Hot Rod”.

O-Ryan “The Hunter” Reay – Because that’s about as good as this will get.

Hideki “Godzilla” Mutoh – Self-explanatory, and for the race at Motegi it will be changed to “Gojira” because we’re culturally sensitive like that.

Franck “Fronkensteen” Perera – When ESPN does his bio they need to have Edgar Winter playing in the background. This is not open for discussion.

Will "Ricky Bobby" Power - As appealing as "Willpower” is, you can't deny he does in fact look more than a bit like the Will Ferrell character. Plus I can feel the comments section filling up with "Shake and Bake!" and "If you ain't first you're last!" already.

Graham “Rahal 2.0” – If for no other reason than it indirectly manufactures a rivalry with Andretti 3.0. And besides, as someone in the comments pointed out he’s probably heard “cracker” since he was in grade school, which admittedly wasn’t very long ago. Now, if we can just get him to grow a mustache.

Oriol “El Matador” Servia – El matador ha perdido muchas veces, pero él todavía compite admirable.

Justin “The Cajun Sheff” Wilson – He still resembles a giraffe, but the fact that he was born in Sheffield sealed the deal.

As an addendum, Mr Carpenter will henceforth be referred to as “Hammer” because his hobby is rebuilding houses and he’s had prominent collisions with popular series starts like Helio and Danica. And considering the possibility that he’s going to run the league someday, it’s probably in our best interest to give him a name with some authority.

Also, as tempting as it is to stick Helio with “Happy Feet” or “Twinkle Toes”, he’s still "Spiderman". Scaling the heights is his thing, as evidenced by the fact that when he won the National Dance-Off the first thing he did was climb the nearest large object, which just so happened to be Cameron Mathison. It’s who he is, and it’s what he does.