Paul Position

So that weird lull after Long Beach is over and we've started a sequence of three races in four weekends - Houston, Monterrey, Milwaukee. After what happened in the season-opener, it was important - crucial, really, with the way Champ Car points system works - to get a good score on the board last weekend, and that's what we did. Houston mission accomplished.

For me, though, the good news started before we even hit the track. You'll remember in my last column I mentioned I was negotiating with Jerry Forsythe for an extension to my contract, but last Thursday in Houston we were able to announce that I have signed with Jerry until the end of 2011, which I think surprised a lot of people in the media. Well, I can tell you, the five-year offer caught me on the bounce too.

Before the season started, Jerry had mentioned he wanted to extend my contract with him for a year or two years, and my manager and I had expressed what my other interests were - like maybe NASCAR. Nothing concrete, but I laid out a plan we'd been thinking about and said 'Okay, we'll sign but I want to do what I've been doing this year, getting some occasional races in other types of car too.'

And Jerry just said to my manager: 'well, how about this? I'll let Paul go and do NASCAR races before the season starts and on off weekends but I want him to stay in this team in this series for five years.'

Well how can you turn that down? He wants me to drive for him for as long as I want to drive open-wheelers, and that's a tremendous compliment to me. He's given me massive financial security for five years, and I have no doubts in my mind that I wanna keep driving. A solid deal with a solid team and the opportunity to have fun in the off-season. That's a hell of an agreement to have.

I wasn't approached by any other Champ Car teams, everyone knows I'm tied to this outfit. And to be honest, there aren't any other teams in a financial position to pay me what I get paid! Even if Newman/Haas had approached me to partner Sebastien Bourdais, I'd have probably said no.

I drove for that team for a year and we were quite successful, but I like the guys I'm working with at Forsythe and enjoy the challenge of trying to match Sebastien. Sure, it would be great to have his car, but I'm happy with my team and working with them to make our car as good as his.

So what did I think of the Reliant Park track? I thought the layout was great, a good design, and if the surface was only as bumpy as our normal street tracks, this new Houston track would be a truly great venue. We had a good crowd, and it was a good first event.

Between qualifying and race, the organisers shaved a lot of the bumps, and improved it by about five per cent. But it would be a massive undertaking to make that track smooth and you can't expect it to be glass smooth. They did the best they could with the time available to them, which was not a lot. The ALMS race the night before didn't finish until 11pm.

Thursday evening didn't look too good for Forsythe when Sebastien was half a second up on Bruno Junqueira, and Bruno four tenths up on me. But that comes down to what I told you before about Newman/Haas' shocks, springs and engineering programs - stuff that we just don't have right now. It means that straight off the truck, they have their cars dialled in.

Interestingly, one of the rules that's up in the air for 2007 is whether there'll be spec-shock and spec-diff packages with the new Panoz car to make everyone start on a level playing-field.

Right now, though, for Forsythe, there's no short-term solution except to work hard, deciding where we most need to improve. But we worked hard over the weekend and closed the gap - kept closing the gap, in fact, and it was a competitive race; it was no runaway victory for Bourdais this time.

It was odd that after Sebastien had that penalty for his car failing technical inspection on Thursday night and lost his times from first qualifying, that he kinda lost his momentum too, didn't seem to be making gains any more.

Then, on Saturday, we moved forward, and from what he said in the press conference, Sebastien had a bad session, got the handling set-up wrong on red tyres [softer optional compound], brushed the wall, and just basically went backwards. It was very strange.

Neil Micklewright [Forsythe's VP of Operations] asked the technical inspectors if it was just running three pounds underweight that had got Bourdais disqualified on Thursday, and the reply was 'no comment'.

Still, he was quick in the race, and definitely Newman/Haas made the right decision on tyres. Sebastien started on blacks [harder compound] when the rest of us started on reds, and the blacks were faster in the race. The rest of us were sliding around and he was carving through the field and got past me into second and right behind Mario [Dominguez, teammate].

Then, when we were on blacks and Sebastien was on reds, Mario was pulling away from him and I was on top of him. So by design or by accident, Newman/Haas chose the right tyre strategy.

I was running a much stiffer set-up than Mario because I can't seem to cope with a really soft car, and he seems to prefer it. When I ran his set-up on Thursday, it felt like we couldn't deal with the amount of pogo-ing we got over the bumps. It bounced violently, and although that softer set-up probably gave a little more grip, I was more inconsistent with it.

Forsythe teammates Mario Dominguez and Paul Tracy pull into Parc Ferme © LAT

So we went for the stiffer set-up, which probably wasn't as quick, but gave us that consistency. To put it another way, my car would chatter across the tops of the bumps, without touching the ground in between, whereas Mario's would follow the road better but had too much vertical movement for me.

We were pretty quick in the race, but maybe just a tick slower than Mario and Sebastien. I was disappointed for Mario that he made that error and went up the escape road, because I know how important it was for him to get a good result. But, it's just one of those things - it's happened to him before, it's happened to me, it's happened to a lot of people. So although I was sad for him, I was happy to get second place.

One more thing I want to mention about the Houston weekend: the accident with Dan Clarke in first qualifying. I want to say again for the record that I didn't see him, and certainly no one told me as I started that out-lap that there was a car coming up on a quick run.

From what I saw on the replay, he tried to go round the outside of me on that long, long right-hand sweeper, and from the middle of that corner onwards, the line for that turn is the outside. I certainly wasn't going slowly by then - maybe at 80 per cent pace - because I was trying to get some heat into the tyres, especially as it was an evening session.

It was so bumpy through there that you don't have a chance to look in your mirrors; you're holding on, you're focused on the track because you know there's a big bump coming up mid-corner just as you click into fifth gear. And even if you did get a chance to check the mirrors, they're shaking so much over those bumps it's impossible to see anything.

Plus, Clarke's in a black car, at night, and on a part of the track where there isn't a lot of lighting! So whatever he thinks, it wasn't anything intentional, nothing malicious. I'm sorry that he crashed... but he spent a fair bit of the weekend doing that without me.

Anyway, on to Monterrey, Mexico. We were quick there last year by race day, so we know what we want to achieve from our car and we'll keep attacking, all weekend. But it's crucial to score good points too.

It's gonna be tough physically because this is as late in the year as any Monterrey race has been, so it'll be massively hot. It was bloody hot in Houston last weekend and now we're heading over 400 miles further south. As a result, for the last couple of days I've been training hard here in Vegas where it's over 100 degrees and I've been riding my bike from 9am to midday, getting ready for this event.

So, Houston proved again that our team is possibly the best in the pitlane at making progress from one session to the next, but it would be better for us all if we can hit the ground running this weekend in Monterrey.

Later.

PT