Season Opener March 6th

The season opener at Homestead-Miami is less than a week away! It won't be long now before the IndyCar rockets on wheels will be taking to the track to begin their 2005 campaign. The opening event is scheduled for Sunday, March 6th at 2 p.m. eastern. Media coverage will include the ESPN TV Network and the IMS Radio Network.

There are 22 entries for the Toyota Indy 300, including four rookies:

Rookie Paul Dana, from St. Louis, Missouri, will be piloting the #91 Toyota with a Dallara chassis for Ethanol Hemelgarn Racing.

Rookie Ryan Briscoe, from Sydney, Australia, will be piloting the #33 Toyota with a Panoz G-Force chassis for Target Chip Ganassi Racing.

Rookie Danica Patrick, from Roscoe, Ill, will be piloting the #16 Honda with a Panoz G-Force chassis for Rahal Letterman Racing.

Rookie Tomas Enge, from Liberec, Czech Republic, will be piloting the #2 Chevrolet with a Dallara Chassis for Panther racing.

All of the other regular drivers in the series will keep their usual car numbers so they will be easy for us to spot. A late entry last season is still kind of new to us thought, the #83 Red Bull/Cheever Racing Toyota driven by Patrick Carpentier was a late addition last season, so we'll have to continue to get used to seeing him and the #83 on the track.

There's already a lot of speculation as to whether Toyota can hold its own against the Honda powerhouse that dominated the 2004 season. Out of the 16 events, the Toyota only won two; and the Chevrolet didn't win any, leaving the other 14 events to be taken by the Honda. News was released last season in regards to this being the last season that Chevrolet will compete in the IndyCar Series. There was speculation after that announcement as to whether Toyota would still continue with their efforts in the series, but before the final event last year, the automaker announced its commitment to the series and the teams that it backs, stating that it had plans to upgrade its presence during the 2005 campaign.

The new engine rules last season that required the building of new engines seemed to have taken the Toyota and Chevrolet camps back a ways, while Honda flourished by lessening the cubic inches from 3.5 down to 3 on their small V8 powerhouses. Hopefully with the off-season testing and the time between the Indy 500 and the end of the season to see where they were off base, the Toyota and Chevrolet engine builders may have come up with a better power plant. It remains to be seen it the Chevrolet people will put out any extra effort for their teams in their last year. If this is the case, don't look for any wins from the Chevrolet drivers. I certainly wouldn't want to be competing from that position. According to the Homestead-Miami entry list, Panther Racing has the only teams which will be competing with the Chevrolet engines in its #2 team with rookie Tomas Enge, and with its #4 team with veteran Tomas Scheckter. There are 10 Toyotas on the entry list and ten Hondas, along with the two Chevrolets, making up the 22 entries for the season opening Toyota 300 event.

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