Frankly Franchitti

The car was pretty good all weekend, and I always seem to have gone well at Toronto and have had some good results. But these things - apart from being encouraging - mean nothing once you're there and climbing aboard the car for the first time on Friday morning. It's back to square one.

We ran pretty well on Friday, although Memo Gidley and I came together right at the end of the session. I was on a semi-decent lap, and he'd just come out of the pits and was warming new tyres. I got inside him but I guess he just didn't see me. These things happen, Memo's not a dirty driver, and I'm sure that he genuinely didn't see me. It wasn't a real problem though.

Qualifying could have been better, sixth is the lowest that I have qualified in Toronto, but at least we weren't 15th. It was very difficult to get a clear lap. It's the same for everyone, but traffic was just a nightmare. We also went the wrong way on the set-up - we tried to cure one problem and we created another without getting the first one fixed. The track was at its best in qualifying, and we didn't take advantage of it. But I knew we had a good race car and the Team KOOL Green crew always give me great pit stops, so it was just a case of staying out of trouble and making up the places.

We had an oil leak in the morning warm-up, so we changed the engine before the race, but pretty much by the second lap of the race I knew the same thing was going on. There was loads of smoke coming out of the cockpit, and basically the oil came straight out of the engine. And with no oil, the engine cried 'enough'.

I had made a good start from sixth - amazingly, this was the first time in five years at Toronto I've not had any contact on the first lap! I got up to fourth place and eventually made it up to second. The car was really dynamite on the brakes. I made the move on Kenny Brack, which I could have probably done three laps earlier, but I just wanted to make sure that 100 per cent nothing was going to go wrong. Gil (de Ferran) was about two seconds ahead. Gil was very, very clean. And to be honest, in the first stint I really didn't have much for him with the way our tyre pressures were going, but we were going to fix that in the next stint; we knew we had a handling imbalance.

So I was just looking after the car and waiting for the first stop, and making the changes. It was looking sweet until then. Everything was great, then the engine just seized We were looking good, coming off the win in Cleveland. But after I went out it seemed like the other guys in the race were just going crazy. Junqueira really needs to have a word with himself! He needs glasses I think because he drove into me in the warm-up, and on Saturday he nearly had me in the wall, just because he's not paying attention - I think him and Takagi pretty much accounted for half of the field, wiping people out...

Whatever though, Toronto is still a cool place, the crowd are awesome, absolutely brilliant. It would have been nice to have continued how we were running, but it wasn't to be. As I say, at least we haven't lost any ground in the championship.

I watched the British Grand Prix on TV on Sunday morning, and I must say I was pretty upset for David (Coulthard), getting hit at the first corner. That makes his chance of taking the championship pretty slim. But Juan's start was demon, eighth to third in one move. I think we've all seen that before!! That was good to watch.

We go to the superspeedway at Michigan this weekend, which will be a completely different ballgame. It's a track where you've just got to pay attention. We've got a new Handford device with an extra big plank on the back, so that'll be interesting. I think it might be a bit of an over-reaction, but we'll see. It won't make things any closer, because there comes a point where things can't get any closer. We're just going there to win the bloody thing. We were on the podium last year, so we'll see what we can come up with.



For Toronto race results, click here.

For Autosport.com's Toronto race report, click here.