CARMEL, Ind. – Kart racer Lane Vacala has joined Dreyer & Reinbold Racing for the remainder of the ARX Rallycross season and the full 2020 ARX campaign.

Vacala will drive the No. 55 DRR/Tyler Lane Construction ARX2 car beginning this weekend in the ARX of Canada doubleheader event at Trois-Rivieres, Quebec.

Vacala, 22, makes his ARX2 debut at Trois-Rivieres while continuing his successful karting career, including as a member of the Factory Compkart racing team in the J3 Competition. Lane has been a top nationally-ranked karting racer for the past five years and won the Great Lakes Sprint Series Championship in 2014.

In addition to the ARX2 action with DRR in 2019, Vacala also plans to compete in the Rotax International Trophy Race in LeMans, France and FIA World Rallycross Championship presented by Monster Energy events in France and the season-finale in South Africa this November.

Vacala recently tested the DRR ARX2 cars with the team and showed outstanding speed in preparing for the ARX of Canada weekend.

“We are very pleased to bring in a young driver like Lane with his past racing credentials,” said Dennis Reinbold, team owner of Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. “We have been very successful bringing in karting racers in the past and Lane’s testing was impressive in our ARX2 cars. We’re anxious to see him compete this weekend at Trois-Rivieres. I think he has a great future in ARX and with our race team.”

Vacala has been a regular on the winner’s podium in karting including at the Rotax All-Stars Finals, Texas Prokart Championship, WKA Mid-Season Shootout and the USPKS Chicagoland Grand Prix. Lane has also tested the Dodge SRT Hellcat with DRR ARX Technical Director Buddy Rice.

“To be joining a team with so much knowledge and history is a dream come true,” said Vacala. “It’s an honor to be racing for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing in ARX. Coming from the karting world and having never raced on dirt before, this will be a whole new experience. I’ve been doing a lot of training and preparation for this season, and I’m excited to finally race.”

Vacala will be joined in the DRR four-car lineup this weekend at the ARX of Canada at Trois-Rivieres by other young racers Cole Keatts, 18, in the No. 53 Black Rifle Coffee Company ARX2 car and female driver Gray Leadbetter, 14,  in the No. 28 Oil2Soil machine. A future announcement will be made regarding the WIX Filters DRR ARX2 machine this coming week.

ROSSBURG, Ohio – NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series competitor Spencer Boyd will sit out Thursday’s Eldora Dirt Derby at Eldora Speedway because of a back injury.

Landon Huffman will drive the No. 20 Young’s Motorsports Chevrolet Silverado in the Eldora Dirt Derby while Boyd recovers. It will be Huffman’s fourth series start.

Boyd confirmed in a tweet Tuesday that the injury happened prior to the race last week at Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa. He said he raced at Pocono against his doctor’s recommendations.

“For the last week I’ve had back pain that I’ve been fighting through,” Boyd said. “I went against my doctor’s advice and raced at Pocono. I’ll be taking his advice this time and sitting out Eldora and perhaps more races to heal properly.”

Thanks for the support guys. #boyd20 pic.twitter.com/ya8zEt0EnA

— Spencer Boyd (@SpencerBoyd) July 30, 2019

Boyd, in his first full season in the Truck Series, earned a best finish of fourth earlier this year in the season opener at Daytona Int’l Speedway.

SOUTHLAKE, Texas – Two NASCAR veterans well known for road racing accomplishments – Wally Dallenbach Jr. and Boris Said – have filed entries for SVRA Vintage Race of Champions Charity Pro-Am at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The VROC Pro-Am race, coming this Saturday, is part of the sixth SVRA Brickyard Invitational.

“Wally and Boris are great friends to SVRA,” said SVRA President and CEO Tony Parella. “Look for them to run up front. Boris was the overall winner at our charity pro-am last September at Virginia International Raceway (VIR).”

Said amassed myriad accomplishments beginning at the onset of his career when he won SCCA Rookie-of-the-Year in 1987. He was national runoffs champion three times, in 1989, ’90, and ’91. It wasn’t long before he asserted his prominence in sports car racing with GT class wins in the Rolex 24 in 1997 and ’98, as well as the 12 Hours of Sebring, also in ’98.

In 2004 he was crowned the Rolex Sports Car Series GT champion and followed that up by becoming the first American to score a 24 Hours of Nurburgring victory in 2005. His prowess as a road racer attracted the attention of NASCAR teams and by 1995 he began racing in the Truck series where he scored a victory at Sonoma in 1998.

He raced in all three major NASCAR series, scoring eight top-10s and two poles in Cup competition, a win in the 2010 Montreal round of the Xfinity series, along with nine top 10s and three poles in Trucks, to go along with his Sonoma win. A versatile talent, Said has also competed in the Australian V8 Supercar series and even the X Games in 2007 and 2015.

Dallenbach launched his professional racing career in the Trans-Am series in 1984. He was immediately successful, winning the Rookie of the Year title. The following year he won the championship for Jack Roush’s Mercury Capri team to make him, at 22, the series’ youngest champion. He repeated as champion again in 1986 for the Protofab Camaro team.

These championships earned him an invitation to the elite IROC invitational series in 1987. Other outstanding accomplishments include four class wins in the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring. Dallenbach began an eleven-year NASCAR Cup career in 1991; scoring 23 top 10s – two coming in the Daytona 500 – in 226 races.

In addition to NASCAR Cup and Trans-Am, the versatile Dallenbach has competed in NASCAR Truck, Xfinity, IndyCar, IMSA Camel GT, and a win in the open wheel division at the Pikes Peak Int’l Hill Climb. He extended his career by becoming a motorsports commentator for TNT and NBC. Dallenbach has also served as a chief steward with the Trans-Am Series Presented by Pirelli.

In addition to Dallenbach, there are seven other drivers in the VROC field with IROC on their resumes. These include Johnny Rutherford, Bobby Labonte, Geoff Brabham, Davy Jones, Roberto Guerrero, Johnny Benson, and Mark Dismore.

The VROC Charity Pro-Am presented by Chopard Watch is a Saturday feature event at the Brickyard Invitational. The cars are 1963 to 1972 vintage Corvettes, Camaros, and Mustangs of SVRA Group 6 A and B Production.  The professionals will be paired with amateur drivers. Amateurs will start the race and be required to drive a maximum of seven laps.

Forward Chris Kunitz, a four-time Stanley Cup winner, has retired after 15 NHL seasons and is joining the Chicago Blackhawks' coaching staff, the team announced Tuesday.

Kunitz spent the 2018-19 season with the Blackhawks, posting five goals and five assists in 56 games.

The 39-year-old won titles with Anaheim Ducks (2007) and Pittsburgh Penguins (2009, '16, '17) and also played for the Atlanta Thrashers and Tampa Bay Lightning. His 1,022 career games ranked 23rd among active players at the end of last season.

"I feel very fortunate to have been a part of four amazing organizations over the last 15 years," Kunitz said in a statement. "First and foremost, I'd like to sincerely thank the Anaheim Ducks, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Chicago Blackhawks. Every one of these organizations was the ultimate example, not only to me, but to my children, on what true professionalism should be."

Kunitz will work in the Blackhawks' hockey operations department as a player-development adviser.

"Chris had an outstanding professional career. His four Stanley Cups and Olympic gold medal speak for themselves," Blackhawks coach Jeremy Colliton said in a statement. "While coaching him last year, I recognized what an asset he would be for our staff and the organization. I'm very pleased to have him a part of our coaching group and, also, use him as a development resource for our young players in Rockford."

When Daniel Carcillo debuted in the NHL back in 2006-07, the clichés were still intact. The fourth-line goons patrolling the ice for a few minutes per game. The ridiculous and reductive staged brawls for the coliseum crowds. All of those dusty "I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out!" jokes were still grounded in reality: 384 games featured at least one fighting major that season, or 31.2% of all games.

That NHL doesn't exist anymore when it comes to fisticuffs. In the 2018-19 season, the NHL had fewer than 200 games with a fighting major, marking the first time in the modern era that the total dipped that low. Today, the fourth-liners are cost-efficient skill players instead of goons, and staged fights are a rarity without those pugilists on the rosters.

In just more than a decade, the league that saw Carcillo amass 324 penalty minutes with 19 regular-season fights as a rookie has seen an incremental decline in fighting in every full season of the past 10. Many are saying there's no going back.

"I believe this is the new normal," said Carcillo, who had 103 career bouts and is now a leading voice for player health awareness, "and I think the game is better off without fighting, no doubt."

The final fighting tallies for the 2018-19 season were new lows across the board for the NHL in the nearly two decades of stats compiled by HockeyFights.com (with the 2018-19 season's numbers tabulated by ESPN Stats & Information). Given that the NHL didn't exactly have a pacifist streak before 2000, it's safe to assume we're seeing fighting at its nadir:

• In 1,271 regular-season games in 2018-19, there were 224 fights in which at least one player received a fighting major. That's down from 280 fights in 2017-18. The number of fights in a full season has dropped every season since 2008-09, when there were 734 fights. In 2001-02, that number was 803. From the 2000-01 season to 2009-10, the NHL averaged 669 fights per season.

• The rate for 2018-19 was 0.18 fights per game, which marks the first time that the average fights per game has dropped below 0.20. From 2000-01 to 2009-10, there were seven seasons in which the NHL had a fights-per-game average of more than 0.50.

• As stated earlier, this was the first time that the NHL had fewer than 200 games with a fighting major. From 2008 to '12, the NHL averaged 471 games with a fighting major per season.

• In 2018-19, 15.3% of regular-season games had a fight. In 2008-09, that number was 41.4%.

• Does it seem like we're seeing fewer brawl-filled games than ever? That perception is reality: Just 24 games last season had more than one fight. That's down from 41 games in 2017-18, which had been the previous low for the past two decades, at a minimum.

• Finally, 245 players engaged in a fight during the 2018-19 season. That's down from 265 players in 2017-18. This number has been declining since a recent peak of 348 players in 2010-11, which matched the totals from the fight-happy days of 2001-02.

Matthew Barnaby was one of those brawlers back in the early aughts. From 1999 to 2002, Barnaby had 59 fights while playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins and Tampa Bay Lightning.

Like Carcillo, he doesn't think fighting is ever going to boomerang back into the zeitgeist for the NHL.

"No, I don't ever see it reversing," said Barnaby, who retired in 2007 and is now a cohost of The Instigators on WGR in Buffalo. "It's the way teams are being built. And having coached junior, it's not a part of that culture anymore, with all the rules in place."

Barnaby is correct that there's a confluence of factors at play. The NHL has changed dramatically since the 2005 lockout, as rule changes pushed the game into an offensive era with an emphasis on skill and skating, pushing out less skilled (and perhaps more fight-inclined) players.

"Assuming the cap system remains intact and the league retains something like the current rules scheme -- one that tends to foster a faster brand of hockey -- I am fairly confident that fighting will have a relatively marginalized existence in the game long into the future," said Stu Grimson, one of the most feared brawlers of his era (1988-2002) who is now an NHL Network analyst.

"Roster space is precious today. Managers are seeing the value of having an effective bottom six. So as managers attempt to populate the deeper parts of their rosters with players who can contribute in meaningful ways, they are probably acquiring players who may not have that [fighting] element in their skill set."

Meanwhile, lower leagues have instituted rules to discourage fighting. The Ontario Hockey League famously followed its "10-fight rule" -- in which a player could be suspended for fights above that threshold -- by dropping that bar to three fights, with incremental increases on the suspensions. Fights dropped by 48% in the OHL in 2016-17, the season following that change.

"The purpose of that was to eliminate the serial fighter, that one-dimensional player. An unexpected byproduct of the rule was a significant decrease in the overall fighting in our league," OHL vice president Ted Baker said at the time.

All of this is happening in an era of unprecedented awareness of player safety and health concerns, specifically when it comes to concussions, CTE and the effects of a physical and injurious game on a player's life well after retirement. Although there have been skeptics about fighting's link to the concussion epidemic -- NHL commissioner Gary Bettman wrote in a 2016 letter to the Committee on Energy and Commerce that "only two percent of video-analyzed concussions resulted from fighting" in the previous season -- Chris Nowinski of the Concussion Legacy Foundation sees the downward trend as being tied to that awareness.

"As the hockey community continues to appreciate that head impacts can have significant long-term consequences, I would expect the number of fights to continue to decline," he told ESPN this week. "That said, if the NHL perceives a ratings decline caused by lack of fights, they may push for fighting to make a comeback."

The NHL declined comment for this story.

Nostalgia can be quite the enchantment, and Barnaby said the fist-filled days of yore still have their appeal.

"I loved the era that I played in and miss the rivalries that were formed," he said. "There were a lot of afternoon naps that were filled with sweaty palms, but the game has never been better and safer. Some fans are always going to miss the way it was, but I'll take watching unreal skill over the fights."

Carcillo agrees.

"Rivalries have less importance, and the NHL can no longer actively sell hate and violence and get away with it. I don't see this trend reversing, and it's a good thing that young men don't have to play hockey with a pre-requirement being that you may have to bare-knuckle box," he said.

Even in its diminished state, a ban on fighting is something for which many continue to advocate. "A fighting ban is still an appropriate goal," Nowinski said, "but based on the choices they have made, I suspect the NHL would prefer to continue to have the threat of fighting as a way to appeal to a subset of fans."

In concert with that entertainment value, Grimson believes there is a place for fighting in the modern game from a tactical perspective.

"I continue to believe that fighting in the following context is still one of the more exciting moments you'll witness in a game," he said. "If my team is flat or trailing in a game and I go out and get into a scrape with my counterpart on the other side, more often than not, I can turn momentum. From the players on the bench to the coach to the thousands in the stands ... that moment can be electrifying because the game will often turn. And no longer are you watching a match where one team is dominating. You usually end up with a closer, more exciting spectacle.

"We don't see that enough in today's game, in my estimation. And the two -- fast, skilled hockey and physical hockey -- are not mutually exclusive."

Yet in today's NHL, we're seeing one increase -- for only the second time since 1996, teams averaged more than 3.00 goals per game in 2018-19 -- while the other continues its decade-long slide into historic lows.

Ex-Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo has cited former rivals Barcelona as proof that money cannot buy success in the Champions League.

Ronaldo, who was in Madrid to pick up his Marca Leyenda lifetime achievement award, is hoping to become just the second player to win the Champions League with three different clubs.

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"It is always the year of Juventus, of Madrid, of Barca," he told Marca when asked whether the Bianconeri were among the favourites for the competition. "In a competition such as the Champions League, only one team can win.

"I'll use the example of Barcelona: look at how much money they have invested in the past five years in players and they have not won a Champions League. That is not how this works. Juve has brought in very good reinforcements and they are a team who are going to fight to win, as they always do.

"But it all depends upon many factors: the draw, the groups, the moments, the injuries, the luck. But, as I always say, you don't have to obsess over Champions League. Juve are going to win, if not this year, I hope it will be the next or in two years.

"And it will be because of our work ethic and because of the way the club is being set up. They have all of the ingredients to win it."

Meanwhile, Madrid president Florentino Perez has said he will "forever" miss Ronaldo and dubbed him the best player in the world.

Ronaldo signed for Juventus for a transfer fee of €100 million after a nine-year spell at the Bernabeu where he won two La Liga titles and the Champions League four times.

Without the five-time Ballon d'Or winner, Madrid endured a disappointing season -- knocked out of the Champions League in the round of 16 against Ajax and finishing 19 points behind Barcelona in La Liga.

"I'll miss him forever," Perez said at an awards ceremony. "I'm a Cristiano fan. He's the best and that's it. How was I not going to come [here]?"

Before moving to the Bernabeu, Ronaldo had enjoyed six years with Manchester United, where he won a Champions League title and the Premier League three times, but said that he missed Madrid more.

"I miss Madrid more than Manchester," he said at the ceremony. "This is due to life's circumstances because my children were born and grew up here and that is special."

Ronaldo also weighed in on the speculation surrounding Neymar's future at Paris Saint-Germain.

The Brazil international was left out of the PSG preseason squad to travel to China, but Ronaldo said he believes Neymar will remain in the French capital next season.

"He's a great player and I get on well with him," he said. "But there's a lot of talk about him with Madrid, Barcelona and Juve. It's the press' job because they need to sell, but I think he will stay in Paris."

Ronaldo, who helped Juventus secure an eighth consecutive Serie A title, said he left Madrid in order to reinvent himself as a player.

He added: "I needed more motivation after winning what I won. I needed a change to express myself as a footballer because I think I still have a lot to offer.

"I still feel motivated and I like what I do, but of course what I like most is winning titles."

Ronaldo scored the winning goal as Juventus beat AC Milan to claim the Italian Super Cup and he also won the Nations League with Portugal in the summer.

Juventus will face Atletico Madrid in their final preseason game on Aug. 10 before starting their domestic campaign away at Parma on Aug. 25.

Paul Pogba is a doubt for Manchester United's friendly with Kristiansund after missing training on Tuesday morning with a back problem, sources have told ESPN FC.

The midfielder, who has been linked with moves to Real Madrid and Juventus, sat out the light session at the Ullevaal Stadion just hours before kickoff against Kristiansund in Oslo.

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He is rated as 50-50 to be passed fit to face the Norwegian side in United's penultimate friendly of the summer before kicking off the season against Chelsea on Aug.11.

Manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is already without striker Romelu Lukaku and defender Matteo Darmian after both failed to make the trip to Norway on Monday.

Lukaku, who is wanted by Inter Milan, is yet to feature in preseason after picking up an ankle injury during the tour of Australia and the Far East.

Darmian also missed the 2-1 win over Tottenham in Shanghai through injury. Both Pogba and Lukaku are keen to leave Old Trafford before the transfer deadline.

Pogba has said he wants a "new challenge" after three years at United.