Joanne Uehling

I am 33 years old, single, never married/no children that I know about <g> and live in Southwestern Wisconsin. I didn't realize the rich history of several of the tracks in Wisconsin and the Upper Mid-West until last year when I attended my first CART race at the Milwaukee Mile. Now, attending "The Mile", Road America and Laguna Seca are mandatory events each year.

I had been a casual television viewer of motor racing through the years and knew enough about the top drivers in various series to enable me to join in conversations about them. Now I realize just how much I didn't know and how the condensed version of a race broadcast and the final outcome do not reflect the action of the race itself.

Owning a large satellite dish system contributed to my enjoyment of the sport immensely, after that fateful day in 1995 when I stumbled upon the wild feed of the F1 GP at Nurburgring, Germany. It was the broadcast of the race live without any announcers, or as they say with natural sound only. I was able to enjoy just the sound of the cars racing around the course followed by post race interviews. I fell in love with this series immediately. Seeing as how the F1 teams have nearly identical paint schemes on their cars, and without the aid of announcers who are quite often mistaken on driver/car identity, I learned to distinguish the cars on the "long shots" by observing the driver's style.

No one in my immediate family was connected to or even was a very big fan of motor racing except for the Indy 500 each year. My family did publish a music newspaper from '77-'83. One of the bands that we gave extensive publicity to was Foreigner. Mick Jones, founding member/guitarist/song writer, kept telling me how exciting the F1 and CART series are. Being from England, he may be slightly biased towards F1, but I'm glad he is. Because Mick is friends with Danny Sullivan and Al Unser, Jr. and his schoolmate/friend Ron Dennis went on to do well in F1, I started taping the wild feeds of these two series for him. In 1996, he told me to watch out or I'll get hooked on motor racing. Told him that it was too late, I already was hooked. It is all or nothing when I get involved in something, from the human aspect of the drivers and learning the technical aspects in layman's terms to getting in depth answers from the chassis designers themselves. Stephanie Coulshaw was kind enough to invite me to join this discussion group and I intend to contribute what/where I can as well as drawing on the vast knowledge located within this group.

I haven't attended an F1 Grand Prix yet but have spoken with a few of the current F1 drivers as they were visiting some of their friends at the Milwaukee CART race this year. As the CART teams are extremely accessible in the paddock area, I now know many of the drivers and a few of the owners as friends and plan on attending a minimum of 6 CART events in 1999. I did attend the USFF2000 races at Homestead and Minneapolis this year at the invitation of Gianfranco De Bellis' Tatuus Racing team. The main races for these events were USRRC Can-Am and NTB Trans-Am races.

The team manager from the F2000 team has received offers to manage a team in Europe in F3000 and Formula Renault. She has already invited me to attend races next year no matter which series she chooses to work in. Can't pass up an opportunity like this, as the saying goes, "So many races---So little time."