Bourdais takes third straight win

From the start, Bourdais took the lead, but could never shake off the RuSPORT pair. When a full course yellow was issued to retrieve debris from the back straight, it coincided with pitstop time. And as the pack of cars filed into the pitlane, they were separated from each other by the proverbial hair's breadth.

Wilson's crew turned the Briton round in time to jump Bourdais out of the pits. On the restart, Wilson, Bourdais, and Allmendinger had to pass Dan Clarke's CTE-Racing HVM machine to lap it, and Allmendinger grabbed the opportunity to go three-wide and nail Bourdais too.

With RuSPORT running on their second set of optional soft tyres, Bourdais did a magnificent job of holding on to the back of them, and when he was able to run two laps longer than Allmendinger and one lap longer than Wilson before the second round of pitstops, it was enough to get the Frenchman out ahead of them.

Wilson gave it all he had, but a small off-track excursion broke the back of his challenge, and in the closing five laps, the top three cruised to the flag.

Allmendinger was further hampered by feeling obliged to let Forsythe's Mario Dominguez past him on the lap he emerged from the pits on cold tyres, as Champ Car came down particularly heavily on blocking in this race.

Allmendinger was further badly baulked by the battle between Clarke and Katherine Legge.

The all-British tussle over 13th eventually resulted in Legge being given a black flag for blocking, and the same fate befell Newman/Haas Racing's Bruno Junqueira as he battled with Paul Tracy's Forsythe car for fourth.

This seemed a curious decision, given that by the time Junqueira got the penalty, Tracy was ahead.

Tracy had nothing to offer the top three, and when all were flat out, he was losing on average half a second a lap, but he came home fourth.

Teammate Dominguez had little better luck, bottled up behind the curiously slow PKV Racing car of Oriol Servia for the first stint. Eventually he clinched sixth, after holding up the impressive and composed Andrew Ranger (Conquest Racing) in the closing laps.

Alex Tagliani of Team Australia had a quiet race, and apart from a couple of minor moments at Turn 3, he spent his closing laps in cruise mode, but doing just enough to hold off Dominguez.

Pos  Driver              Team               Time
 1.  Sebastien Bourdais  Newman Haas        1h39:50.252
 2.  Justin Wilson       RuSPORT            +     3.066
 3.  A.J. Allmendinger   RuSPORT            +    14.132
 4.  Paul Tracy          Forsythe           +    47.222
 5.  Alex Tagliani       Team Australia     +    57.778
 6.  Mario Dominguez     Forsythe           +    58.782
 7.  Andrew Ranger       Mi-Jack Conquest   +    59.302
 8.  Oriol Servia        PKV                +  1:13.956
 9.  Cristiano da Matta  Dale Coyne         +  1:14.958
10.  Bruno Junqueira     Newman Haas        +    1 lap 
11.  Will Power          Team Australia     +    1 lap 
12.  Charles Zwolsman    Mi-Jack Conquest   +    1 lap 
13.  Dan Clarke          CTE HVM            +    1 lap 
14.  Nicky Pastorelli    Rocketsports       +    1 lap 
15.  Katherine Legge     PKV                +    1 lap 
16.  Jan Heylen          Dale Coyne         +    5 laps
17.  Nelson Philippe     CTE HVM            +   76 laps

Fastest lap: Bourdais, 1:14.529 on lap 65