Ryan Briscoe is best known probably for his horrific wreck at Chicagoland in 2005. In fact, I think that wreck makes him the only of the three contenders to appear on the cover of book (and a mighty fine book at that).  Ryan Briscoe was born in Sydney, Australia, but due to his affluent upbringing, he wasn’t required to turn to the Aussie mob to get his career going.  Born on September 24th in the year of 1981, he aims to be the first IndyCar champion younger than myself.

The tale of Ryan Briscoe is pretty typical for a formula driver.  He drove karts and various formulae around the world before making his first big step up the ladder to the European development scene in 2000.  By 2002, he had landed himself a ride as a test driver for Toyota’s F1 effort, and by 2004, he was Toyota’s Friday driver, and things were looking up for the young Aussie.  His role as Friday driver was notably achieved after Toyota sacked former CART champ Cristiano Da Matta.

In 2005, Toyota did what they do best: sold the deed to his soul to Chip Ganassi.  Well, if there was one year you didn’t want to drive for Chip Ganassi, it was probably 2005.  After struggling all season (thanks to a lame duck Toyota engine) and the aforementioned horrific accident at Chicagoland, his services weren’t retained by Ganassi for 2006.  He ran basically every series on the planet, including the ICS, Champ Car (again due to Cristiano Da Matta, who had a life threatening collision with a deer at Road America), and A1GP, in 2006.  By 2007, though, things looked pretty bleak.

Things turned around when The Captain decided to make a last ditch effort in making Ryan Briscoe a competent driver.  Wondering what ever happened to the once young and promising star, Penske decided he had 24 hours to prove to himself that Briscoe still had it in him  Since that was a short amount of time, Penske used his endless supply of money to invent a time machine.  Logically, the time machine was made out of a telephone booth (it certainly wasn’t made out of a Saturn).  The two departed on a most excellent adventure.

They used the time machine to examine Briscoe’s past.  After being led through time by a dude name Rufus, who looked like George Carlin, and meeting Joan of Arc, who looked like the guitarist from The Go Go’s, Penske had convinced himself that Briscoe was worth taking a chance on.

Unfortunately, through their travels, they had accidentally interfered with past events, so when they came back to the future, they had things all out of whack.  They somehow managed to bring back disco music into the mainstream.  This actually excited Ryan Briscoe, as the only creative thing you can do with his name is Briscoe Inferno.  Initially, Briscoe and Penske tried to fit in, but by the 2008 season, when Briscoe was about to re-enter the IndyCar Series after the departure of Cristiano Da Matt…I mean Sam Hornish, this team photograph led them to realize they must correct the past:

So they went back in time to warn their past selves of how they were going to mess up the future.  They eventually succeeded but only by successfully guessing what number the past Ryan and Roger were thinking of.  In the end, Roger had to pay himself off to keep himself from traveling back in time.

I did my best, folks.

Fin.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 5:22 pm and is filed under ICS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.