Paul Position

For me, there's two ways of looking at the Monterrey race 10 days ago. The downer is that we weren't on the pace of Sebastien Bourdais or Justin Wilson, and when it mattered, we weren't on AJ Allmendinger's pace either. So it sounds like a bum weekend. The flip-side is that despite that, we did finish fourth and scored good solid points.

I know some long time autosport.com readers will think that last comment doesn't sound like the image they have of Paul Tracy, and I admit, back in my Penske days I was a little bit more win-or-bust. But I want the title, and to get that, I've got to maximise my results on days when me and my Forsythe Championship Racing crew don't have the car set-up right. Fifths, fourths and thirds become crucial in the final analysis, so whatever happens, I wanna finish every race in the top five.

Last year I was fourth in the championship, mainly because I had five DNFs from the 13 rounds. This year, if we can stay in the game on the bad days, and keep improving our car so that we have more good days, then we'll be title contenders, simple as that.

I'm figuring that sooner or later, Bourdais is going to have bad luck too. He hasn't been in that situation yet; he's been lucky with his reliability and had things go the way any driver would want them to go. But that's got to change at some point.

However, we're not just here to pick up the pieces when Bourdais's car breaks. We want to beat him. And to beat him, we're going to have to be better than him. A pretty hard ask. We go back to the subject of the shock absorbers that Newman/Haas have. As you know, I feel they have a huge advantage over the rest of the field in that area.

We study the split times, we watch the videos, we watch at the track, and Sebastien's performances look effortless. You look at the rest of us and we're hanging on for dear life to get a qualifying lap in. And I'm not just talking about my own team, Forsythe Championship Racing. We all have a hell of a lot of work to do - RuSPORT, PKV Racing and Team Australia too - to catch Newman/Haas. We have to bridge that gap.

My problems at Monterrey started in practice. I had all sort of braking troubles and just could not get them to stop locking up all weekend, especially the rears. We changed to harder pads and bigger master cylinders, but it seemed that once the tyres were under any sort of pressure, they'd lock under braking. It's a problem we've had there the last couple of years.

Then in first qualifying, I had that issue with Dan Clarke, where he blocked me for almost a whole lap, then let me through - and then spun! I was mad at the time, but afterwards, he got a scolding from Champ Car, and he came over to our truck looking for me and he came in and apologised. Clarke said 'I'm having a hard time right now, things are all going wrong,' and I said 'Hey don't worry about it'.

I guess that's all I can really do - accept the apology, and accept that he probably didn't do it intentionally. He's young, not a lot of experience, especially at this level. The competition level is quite high, and at the moment he's probably concentrating so hard on what's going on in front of him that he probably just didn't see me behind. Let's say that for now the matter's closed between me and him.

Saturday, another problem hit us hard and that was the issue with the red, soft-option tyres. I don't know what's going on with them this year. The year before last, in 2004, our car had no grip and was just sliding. The general balance was okay, but no grip. Last year, I don't know if Bridgestone changed the tyre compound but we seemed to be fairly good on grip.

Now this year, I don't know if they've changed the compound again or what, but I seem to have lost grip again, back to '04 kinda levels. That's what I've been struggling on this year: the limit of where the tyre is actually gripping onto the road is just not where I want it to be. Balance is good, but we're losing too much time sliding.

There's some fault on our side too: we've always been weaker on the road-course tyre, like the ones we ran in Monterrey. The street-course tyre suits our set-up generally better, and I tend to qualify better on street-courses. But this problem on the reds stayed right into the race.

We started the race on the worst set of optional tyres - the ones that had most laps on them, but once I got past Bruno Junqueira I was able to hang on to Bourdais, Wilson and Allmendinger. However, then the rears went away. We thought the fresher set of optionals should be better for the second stint, but actually the rears went away again pretty much right away.

It wasn't just me that found this out the hard way either. I think everyone who ran reds in their second stint came to regret it, because they just didn't last. Bourdais ran the black tyres, the harder compound, and it looked like he was able to quite easily hold on to the RuSPORT guys when they were on reds.

Anyway, in that second stint we were just going slower and slower; the rears were shot, and I was losing a bunch of time to Alex Tagliani, who was closing in on me. So after he pitted, we did too, and we changed to blacks.

Unfortunately we under-pressurised the rear ones a lot to make sure that when they came up to temperature they weren't over pressurised and therefore overheating. So it took maybe five or six laps for them to start operating properly. Once they did that, I was able to pull away from Tag at about a second a lap.

I think if I hadn't lost so much time to him in the second stint, I could have matched AJ's pace in the third, kept a bit of pressure on. But by then he'd checked out, so I ran the rest of the race alone. There was no one to push me, and no one for me to push, so we just cruised to finish fourth. We've got some points, we're sixth in the championship. Nothing to get excited about... Yet!

Paul Tracy chases Bruno Junquiera (Newman-Haas) and AJ Allmendinger (RuSPORT) © LAT

By the way, a lot of people came and asked me what I thought about Bruno's drive-through penalty after he blocked me, and I can only say that Tony Cotman [Champ Car VPO], the guy who calls the shots up in Race Control, did what he said he was gonna do in the pre-race driver briefing.

At the start of the year, Cotman gave us a big driver's briefing, and we watched about an hour-long video of what he considered blocking - situations with me, with Sebastien, with AJ, Justin and so on - and all of these were fouls. Any blocking that went on would result in a penalty. So we thought 'fine, we know where we stand'.

Then we went to the second round in Houston and there was a lot of blocking going on there, so I jumped on Cotman's case really hard about it after that race, and at Monterrey he got severe: there are gonna be no more shenanigans on the track. He said 'I'm not gonna catch everything, but if I see you blocking, you're coming in for a drive-through penalty. If you want to try it, go ahead.'

So everyone was well warned before we went out for the race. The first time I passed Bruno, he had slid wide at the previous corner, clipped a kerb, lost traction and momentum down to the hairpin. I got a run on him, he saw me coming and let me by. But on the restart, almost the exact same thing happened, but this time he swerved over and blocked me on the inside. He took the decision to defend his position rather than being on the racing line, and so he got penalized for it. Simple as that.

Now Cotman has set a precedent for it, and he's got to continue to deal like that with every incident, with everyone and everywhere. In the past, there has been a varying degree of penalty according to who you were and what your history with Race Control has been! Now, I hope we're getting some real consistency.

Overall, I guess the third round played out pretty representative of where our car was at in Monterrey. But I have to say, I'm a lot more optimistic for Milwaukee this weekend, and I think we have as good a chance as anybody. I have more experience there than anyone else, and it's not like the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. That was flat out all the way round, and so being fast was all about aerodynamics, drag and horsepower.

At Milwaukee, experience really counts for something - knowing how to take starts and restarts, and having good feel for the limit of the tyres when they've lost temperature from running slow. People like AJ and Sebastien just don't oval race enough to know about things like that.

Out of my competition, it's Bruno, I guess, who'd be the most experienced on ovals, but I would suspect he might be a little cautious this weekend because of his back. He really can't afford to have an incident there.

As for Sebastien, of course we have to expect him to be good at every race and he's getting better and better at oval racing, but this is his fourth visit to Milwaukee and he hasn't really come to grips with the Mile yet.

By contrast, my team has always had a good car there, and even in qualifying - which isn't so important on an oval - they've had a couple of poles. So they know the set-up, I know the set-up... and I've won there four times before. Now we just need the weekend to go right for us.

Get back to you soon, hopefully with something seriously good to talk about.

PT