Paul Position

Hello to autosport.com readers. This is the first of my columns, exclusive to this website, and here we are just a few days away from Champ Car's first round of the season in Long Beach.

First of all, though, my views on the series. Some people have questioned my commitment to Champ Cars because I've been driving NASCARs and Grand Am cars. Well, my target this year is the Champ Car title: it is - and has been for the last 15 years - my priority.

However, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I haven't considered my long-term future, or pretend that everything's rosy in the world of North American single-seaters. It isn't, so for the record here are my feelings.

I think the growth of the Champ Car World Series is good. They've added some good events. Edmonton is a huge success, I think bringing Houston back (on a different course from before) is a real positive too. There's a big Hispanic element to the crowd, which always made it a great event in the past. So in terms of the growth and direction of the series, everything has gone in the right way.

Obviously the main struggling point of the series is the lack of sponsorship in North America - and to an extent, around the world - for open-wheel racing. Unless it's a NASCAR, companies aren't interested.

The landscape of the series is good, the direction of the series is good but there comes a point in time when Kevin Kalkhoven and Gerry Forsythe [Champ Car co-owners] have to wean some of the other team owners off putting their hands out for funding when sponsorship deals aren't in place at the start of the year. Teams have gotta make it on their own: that's business.

Back in the late '90s and early 21st century, there was more money around and the teams could go hire the best guy they could get. It's not like that any more, and it's the same in the Indy Racing League, and it's the same in Formula One. The back half of the grid has people who have had to bring money - a lot of money - to get a ride.

To run a car for a year in this series takes $4m or $5m (USD), and you can pay that just to drive a third F1 car on the Friday at a Grand Prix.

The answer for North American open-wheel racing is reunification, but I'm not putting a lot of hope into it yet. I've been through this war for ten years. Every year I've heard comments like 'we're working on reunification' or even 'it's going to happen'. It's the same every year: from January right up to the Indy 500 in May, a light bulb goes off in someone's head and they say 'Oh we need to get the two series together'.

Well Mario Andretti, Michael Andretti, Barry Green, Gerry Forsythe, Kevin Kalkhoven, Roger Penske... they've all tried it, and so far what's happened? So no, I don't get my hopes up and lay in bed at night hoping and wishing they'd get back together.

If it happens, then that's great: it would be great to have the best drivers from each series, mix in some of the races the IRL has with the great races we have in Champ Cars, and you'd have one truly great series. That would be fantastic. But I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it, because I don't have any control over it, don't even have any influence over it.

What I do have influence over is my performance and the performance of my Forsythe Championship Racing team, so let's talk racing.

The quality at the front of the 2006 Champ Car field will be deeper than last year, so what we need at Forsythe this year is consistency. I know we're gonna be a factor in every race, we're gonna run at the front in every race, but we've got to finish every race. That's the bottom line.

Last year, a couple of times we made mistakes as a team, I screwed up in Denver, and then there were a couple of incidents with Sebastien Bourdais too. Well, in a 15-race series, we cannot afford to drop five races.

So who have we got to beat? Well, looking at the final pre-season test in Fontana last week, I don't think there are any real surprises there.

Newman/Haas are going to be the team to beat again. Bourdais is the champion, so of course he's the first person we've all got to beat, and he's looking strong as usual. And Bruno Junqueira has proven he's up to the challenge again too - he looked fit out of the car, and was going well in the car. He wants to remind everyone that the last time he raced in this series, he won.

At RuSPORT, Justin Wilson is going to be a lot stronger because he's worked with his engineer for a whole year, and he now has a couple of wins under his belt and has proven he's got what it takes to win.

AJ Allmendinger will be fast but still hasn't figured out how to get to the end of the race while he's leading, so it remains to be seen how he handles things whenever Justin is ahead of him this year. AJ didn't handle it well last year, and that's a hurdle he's gotta get over. He's got to try and learn from Justin and not treat it as the end of the world every time his teammate's a tenth of a second quicker.

As well as Forsythe, Newman/Haas and RuSPORT, there are question-mark teams too, and in particular I'd mention Team Australia. Alex Tagliani will be quick again in his second year with the team, although he hadn't tested all winter until Sebring last week. Don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but he's always quick on street courses, and at road courses like Montreal and Road America he's quite quick too.

It's hard to say whether anyone is going to be dominant in terms of victories this year. I mean, I didn't really expect Bourdais to win six races last season - but he did. The way the championship shook out last year, I felt I could have won six or seven races, and I only won two. We led way more laps than anyone else.

I fell out of Toronto when I was leading with a broken front wing; we led in Surfers, but an oil line worked loose and ran it out of oil and locked up the engine; we had two races where I had contact with Bourdais that put us out - Las Vegas and Monterrey. So there's four races where we would have finished first or second.

Then there's Denver, where I crashed on my own leading by ten seconds. So five events where I could have scored between 28 and 33 points - approximately 150 points in total. I lost the championship by about 100...

Well, we all know racing is unpredictable, so here I've just been trying to make a calculated guess as to who will figure at the front. This weekend we stop guessing it and start gassing it: it's Long Beach, where I've won four times before.

Will get back to you next week.

PT