Wheels Blog: Coming Up Is Auto Racing’s Biggest Weekend of the Year

Alexander Klein/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A woman watches the first practice session at the Circuit de Monaco in Monte Carlo on Thursday.

This weekend is auto racing’s biggest of the year. No major championship will be decided, but the weekend will see three classic events run in the United States and Europe. The action kicked off Thursday morning with practice in Monaco, which on Sunday will be the site of the sixth event of the year counting toward the Formula One World Drivers Championship.

On this side of the Atlantic, the 97th running of the Indianapolis 500 will be on Sunday, and that evening Nascar’s longest race, the Coca-Cola 600, will be run at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. All three events will be televised.

NBC Sports, in the first year of its Formula One contract, is scheduling more than 19 hours of live broadcasts instead of having its announcers in an American studio talking over the Formula One feed. On the day of the race, the pre-event show will air on NBC Sports at 7 a.m.; the race itself will be on the NBC network at 7:30 a.m., the first time a Formula One event has been televised live on a major American TV network.

Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One’s boss, has demanded ultra-soft tires, turning this year’s championship into a guessing game over which tire compound to use. Sebastian Vettel of Germany, the three-time champion and his Renault-powered Red Bull car are in the lead with 89 points, with the Finnish Lotus-Renault driver Kimi Raikkonen in second at 85; Fernando Alonso, the Ferrari team leader from Spain is third with 72 points. Vettel and Alonso have each won two races, Raikkonen one. The event will consist of 78 laps of the 2.07-mile circuit for a total of 161.4 miles.

The Indianapolis 500, in its earlier years the dominant sporting event of the Memorial Day weekend in the United States, has declined in stature as a result of decades of internecine warfare among teams, organizers and sanctioning bodies, but still manages to produce a major spectacle for the more than 300,000 fans in attendance.

Ed Carpenter Jr., stepson of the former Indianapolis Motor Speedway president, Tony George, has the pole position with a qualifying time of 228.76 m.p.h. During qualifying, there was only a gap of 1.4 seconds a lap – or about five m.p.h. – between Carpenter and the last car in the 33-car field, driven by Katherine Legge.

ABC will be televising the 500 for the 49th consecutive year, beginning at noon. The race itself – 200 laps around the 2.5-mile oval – starts at 1 p.m.

Mike Mccarn/Associated Press Denny Hamlin after winning pole position for Sunday’s Nascar Sprint Cup series Coca-Cola 600 auto race at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C.

Five hours later and about 600 miles to the southeast, the Coca-Cola 600, the day’s longest event, will get under way. Jimmie Johnson, the five-time Nascar champion and six-time winner of events at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, is as usual one of the favorites. Whereas passing at Monte Carlo will be difficult on the narrow city streets, passing at Charlotte is something else: the 1979 Nascar event holds the local record for passes – 59 lead changes in 400 laps.

The 600 will be shown on Fox, with preliminaries at 5:30 p.m. and the race beginning at 6 p.m.