Fear factor

One of the greatest disappointments of this week has been the lack of any recent podcast from the Braintrust at TSO. These otherwise dedicated racing insiders have now gone over a month without an audio offering, and as a consequence your humble host is going into withdrawal. There’s no race this week and as such I was looking forward to spending some time listening to Joe and Patrick hash out the real issues of IndyCars in their distinctive quaalude vs caffeine styles. Sadly, that ain’t happening.

Fortunately one person who was ready to chat it up MP3 style this week was none other than everyone’s favorite hand puppeteer, Mrs Danica Patrick. Danicker took time away from her intensive pit road lecture series to spend some time with ESPN’s own “Sports Guy”, Bill Simmons, who knows about as much regarding IndyCars as I do about La Crosse. (And just to belabor the point, I don’t even know if I spelled “La Crosse” correctly.)

Give Simmons (who’s relation to Gene or Jeff remains in question) credit though, because in the course of his conversation with (fill in your own nickname for her) he managed to get Mrs Hospenthal to admit to having more than her share of fears. This list includes but is not limited to:
• Tripping in high heels
• The dark
• Dark water
• Bugs
• Heights
• Towel-throwing Venezuelans (OK, I made that up. Still...)

Congratulations Danica haters, because you now know you can now get your jollies by standing for hours in the autograph line and “accidentally” dropping rubber spiders on the table while Danica! is signing one of her billions of daily autographs. She might jump, you might laugh, but remember that it probably ends with Security Chief Charles all over you like a bad rash.

And as someone who has seen the man mountain that is Charles from just a few feet away, let me tell you - that’s what I’m afraid of. Give me bugs in dark water over Charles any day. At any rate, listen to the entire interview here and find out who “Ricky Bobby” is.