- Logan Thompson and Matt Roy rode two-seat IndyCars around the Freedom 250 street course in Washington
- Roy asked twice how fast they were going and got told 165, maybe 170
- Read below for the video of both laps and what the Capitals said in the car
Matt Roy asked twice how fast he was about to go. Nobody gave him a comforting answer.
The Capitals defenseman and goaltender Logan Thompson climbed into specially built two-seat IndyCars on Friday for a high-speed lap around the Freedom 250 Grand Prix street course in Washington, with professional drivers doing the steering. Told they would run 165, maybe 170, Roy had heard enough.
“This is crazy,” Roy said. “This is insane.”
He was not hiding the nerves beforehand either.
“I’m actually pretty nervous,” Roy said.
Washington put the whole ride on its account. Watch both of them go:
Roy went first, and his head bounced around the back seat for most of the lap. He came around on the experience by the time they rolled back in.
“This is insane. This is wild,” Roy said. “Oh, man. Incredible. That was sick.”
Thompson enjoyed himself from the first corner. The sixth-ranked goalie on the NHL Network’s top 10 list spent his lap hollering.
“Woo hoo hoo hoo!” he yelled. “That was unbelievable. Nothing like that, holy crap. Adrenaline. That was really fun.”
The circuit is 1.7 miles and seven turns, wrapping around the National Mall with a 0.4-mile straight down Pennsylvania Avenue. Cars run past the National Air and Space Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the National Archives, with the Capitol and the Washington Monument sitting in the background.
Capitals owner Ted Leonsis took a lap of his own at 69 years old, though no video of that one surfaced. Earlier Friday he rang the New York Stock Exchange opening bell from the track:
Leonsis owns Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which is handling marketing, sponsorships and corporate hospitality sales for the race. That partnership is how two hockey players wound up strapped into open-wheel cars in the middle of August.
The Freedom 250 runs Sunday. Thompson and Roy get about a month before training camp, and neither one is topping 170 miles an hour again anytime soon.
