Jottings

• Pressdog has filed an excellent interview with Bob Varsha. It's mostly about F1, but there's still plenty of interest for the Indycar fan.
• To followup my Conquest-Tagliani story yesterday: Curt Cavin is confirming via twitter that Tags is in with Conquest.
• Rubicon is announcing King Tut sponsorship for Tagliani's #34 machine via twitter.
  
• Follow these and all stories as they are happening at http://twitter.com/racemind.
  

Conquest Expected to Tap Alex Tagliani

Breaking News: After the today's post about Indy TBA's and Conquest Racing, I've received word now that Conquest will name Alex Tagliani for the Indy 500.

After I speculated about Tomas Scheckter and Alex Tagliani, I was told "You are correct about one of those two, and it isn't Scheckter." Sly, huh?

Nevertheless, this isn't a shock as Tagliani was the presumptive driver if Conquest answered the bell. But it's one more piece of the TBA puzzle.

Some Clues About Indy 500 TBA's

The two Conquest Racing Indy 500 entries are still listed as TBA (driver To Be Announced), but there's some signs of activity.

First, the team twitter (twitter.com/ConquestRacing) sent out a teaser pic of a black-and-yellow bit of body work with this caption: "Our car will have a new paint scheme for Indy. We can't show what the car will look like just yet but you can try and guess!"

And guess I shall. The use of "our car" suggests they are planning to run just one car, not two. And the paint scheme looks vaguely like the Symantec car from last year:

(Photo Credit: daylife.com)

Now the word is that Symantec is not in a good financial position to be sponsoring Indycars, but it begs the obvious question: could this be a car for Tomas Scheckter?

...Or could it be for Alex Tagliani, Conquest's driver at Long Beach? Curt Cavin listed Tagliani as one of the Indy 500 rookies, even though Tagliani does not appear on the Indy 500 entry list.

Conquest has schedule an announcement for Tuesday, and I expect we will hear about either the sponsor or the driver -- hopefully both.