Drivers unhappy with tyre chicanes

Justin Wilson fractured his scaphoid bone yesterday when his RuSPORT car's front wheel brushed the tyres which were surrounded by thick rubber banding.

The band grabbed his tyre's sidewall, snatching the steering wheel through his hand and wrenching his wrist.

"The really annoying thing about it is that it was such light contact that it didn't even alter the toeing of the steering, but it was enough to break a bone!" said the Briton.

"I don't understand why the chicanes had to be this way. It's got to be avoidable."

Paul Tracy was another to fall victim to the bands yesterday, having his right front wheel torn off, sending the Forsythe Championship Racing car into the wall.

"I told Tony Cotman [Champ Car's VP of Operations] that we need to take this band off because it's just tearing up the cars," said Tracy. "He told me 'Can't you just drive round it'. Well the thing is here that you get quicker and quicker and more committed. That's our job, to go as quick as possible.

"I've told Tony that the same thing's gonna happen again. Now we've lost Justin probably from the last two races of the year. What if he'd been a real championship contender? What's the sense in this?

"So now for today, they've taken the rubber band off, and replaced it with plastic, and lowered it flush with the tyres that it goes around. So now it just rips your rear winglets off..."

For once it was no surprise that Sebastien Bourdais concurred with Tracy, as he fell victim to the chicanes today. Going through Turn 1, the front right wheel of the Newman/Haas Racing car clipped the chicane tyres, launching the reigning champion into the outside wall.

"I was maybe five centimetres over the plastic, and I just took off, a passenger," said a disgruntled Bourdais. "By the time I knew where I had any control over the car, it was missing its left side.

"The new plastic surround to the chicane tyres is not deformable, it doesn't collapse as you run over it and it's just a step which sends you off so the car goes into the air when you hit it."

Bourdais continued: "I admit there is no easy fix to the situation right now. Taking the band off, like last year, didn't work because they became constantly moving apex. Every time someone went over the tyres, they moved, so each lap around, they were in a different place."

Bourdais is particularly unhappy because the current idea was proposed to the four-man driver safety committee - Bourdais, Wilson, Alex Tagliani, Oriol Servia - with Cotman sending diagrams to each, and they unanimously disapproved.

"I said to Tony, 'What, are you trying to kill us?' We suggested something similar to Long Beach, using rumble strips, and then we get here and discover that, hey, they're going to run what they proposed anyway. So what was the point in asking us?"

"It's a pity," Bourdais concluded, "because Champ Car now has had a lot of wrecks, team mechanics have had a lot of extra work, for what I think are avoidable reasons.