Dario Franchitti

Jensen Button is going to join us.

We've got Marino Franchitti and Dario Franchitti, the Scottish brothers.

Marino is the head test driver.

Oh, look, that's our software.

This is not a shocker because we've heard this is coming for a little while.

We started wondering if there might be some Ganassi people joining Scott Dixon at Errol McLaren and then started hearing, I think the first I heard, I heard, at the hotel two hours after the Laguna Seca race that yep Ross Bunnell just let him know that he is leaving and Marshall Pruitt has confirmed that on racer.com he had a whiff of that a week or two ago and confirmation the story that was posted on Tuesday afternoon Ganassi parting ways with two of its greater engineering talents at the end of the year in a call with racer last week Ganassi, the team, confirmed the upcoming departure of Chris Simmons, whose tenure dates back to the 2000s and includes three championships, two 500 wins as the race engineer, Dario Franchitti.

He was also the race engineer for Tony Kanaan during his time with the team.

And he won two titles with Scott Dixon.

Let me pull up the article now.

So they had a strong season.

So that's significant right there.

And then part three of this in Marshall's article says, CGR is also facing another potentially seismic loss with its most tenured race engineer in Julian Robertson.

Yeah.

You know, you can just, you can, you can have too much of a good thing, shall we say? So, but I find it interesting that Dario is a very keen, Dario Franchitti is a very keen historic racer, always goes.

indycar champion you've got uh scott who was i think it was his first year last year from memory and now he's gone again this year indycar champion uh javier knows first year this year formula one world champion jensen buttons driving formula one world champion uh multiple tom christensen elio elio

castroneves is there jimmy johnson exactly and you've got to see

I felt sorry for Honda because they must have...

I remember Dario Franchitti was doing some development work with them at the time, I think because of his connection with Honda and the powertrains in...

in indie but i know he said they they put so much so much effort into that car and you can feel it in in the way it does what it does but they sold it's like two and a half thousand cars or something in just like an aston martin between 2016 and 2020 too so it must have cost them

yep and there was no i don't think they did a type r version they did like an

Jenson Button is gonna be there.

Jenson Button's gonna race with the Franchitti brothers, and, uh, Patrick's gonna be out there as well.

Patrick Long, that's right.

Great.

Top bunk would be David Leslie.

Then there's two further beds over the cab, one for me, got about two foot of clearance, and then one next to me, which got about one foot of clearance, which was occupied by a little chap called Dario, who was 17 years old and doing work experience, cleaning the car in his scooter on the days and weekends, and yeah, that was Dario Franchitti, who went on to great things, I think won Indy 500 three times, so it was quite a nuts period, but Yeah, the whole David Leslie thing was fantastic because they were so focused on winning, so passionate.

Every penny went into the car.

Every morning, Father David would pack up all the beds and would cook bacon sandwiches for everybody.

And I think the last time there was an opportunity for someone to do that was, and it's a story that's not that well known, but Jeff Gordon very nearly came over to F1 to race with BAR back in the day.

He was going to come over and do a couple of years of IndyCar, take Dario's seat.

Dario was going to come and Dario Franchitti was going to come to BAR and Jeff was going to join him.

And it was going to be this Dario Franchitti, Jeff Gordon super team at BAR, which would have been...

Unbelievable.

You think like, can you imagine that early to that? I think it was like in like 2000, 2001, something like that.

Dario Franchitti, Jeff Gordon, BAR Honda in Formula One, like box

office would have been incredible.

that.

And Ashley Judd is married to or was married to Dario Franchitti, race car driver.

I did not know that.

What a fun series of information we're stumbling upon.

We are learning so many

things today.

Ah, Naomi Judd, Dario Franchitti.

Interesting.

I think so.

I mean, if you go back to when Dario Franchitti was a teammate with Scott Dixon, Dario joined the team on the back of Scott already being a three-time champion for Chip.

Dario then rattled off three championships on the bounce head-to-head.

So history would indicate that, yes, Chip will let his drivers race.

Chip very surprised that he was available as well.