Paul Position

After retiring on the first lap of a race, I wouldn't normally have a whole lot to write about. But over the 10 days since the race, a lot of significant things have changed in Champ Car, as you're probably aware. So let's get the racing out of the way first.

As you know, I went to Milwaukee with pretty high hopes for scoring Forsythe Championship Racing's first win of the year, so qualifying 10th was a pretty shitty start to our efforts. What happened was that we took the shocks off and made a change in the rear of the car before qualifying to take a little of the understeer out of the car as the track temperatures went up.

When I started the qualifying run, I had just a tiny bit of understeer, and probably we'd have been alright for a decent time, but I thought I'd loosen it up a little, just to get the turn-in a little bit better. Unfortunately, when the crew put the shocks back on, the electronic weight-jacker got wired up back to front.

So coming out of Turn 4 on the final warm-up lap, I thought 'I'll just dial that little bit out', but into Turn 1, I thought 'Shit, more understeer. Jack it some more.' Turn 3, even more understeer, and I'm thinking 'What's going on?' So I adjust it some more.

Come around to 1, the thing's pushing like crazy, and at Turns 3 and 4, it won't even turn. Those laps go by so quickly that you don't have time to figure it's been wired up wrong. It's just not something that normally happens so it wouldn't really occur to you.

Still, it's just a mistake and we paid the price and ended up 10th. Unfortunately, we paid for it in the race too, because we should have been ahead of Mario [Dominguez]'s accident. But if you sleep with the dogs, you get the fleas.

My own take on the accident was that Mario and I had come off Turn 2 side-by-side and he hit the power to pass button down the back straightaway, so as we came up on Turn 3, I was about at his back wheel.

Now I backed off about as late as I could back off, and I'd say on cold tyres I'm a pretty good gauge of how hard you can go into the turn. And he just gapped me into the corner by a car length, but then had to turn tight getting in and went underneath Bruno [Junqueira] who was on his own line, and had set his own path for the corner.

Well, when you're turning that hard and carrying too much speed, you're going to get pushed. And that's exactly what happened - Mario pushed up the track and went into him, caught Bruno's left rear.

I know it was an honest mistake, no malice in it, but I think Champ Car Race Operations were right to dock Mario his points. They realised that after what he did in Long Beach you just can't have drivers diving into corners and taking out championship contenders and potential race-winners, because it just makes the race a boring event. So after Long Beach they sat everyone down and said: 'Look, we're not going to stand for any more of this stuff'.

So how much did we lose there? Could we have won? Yeah, I reckon so, because although starting from 10th means we had a few cars to pass, I'd already got the PKV cars, and Will Power. Then [Sebastien] Bourdais got his puncture, and went a lap down, and came out just behind Katherine [Legge], ready for the restart, and she pretty much just let him go.

Now you can be sure that if it had been me leading the restart, Sebastien wouldn't have got by. He wouldn't have got that lap back so easily, so he'd have been basically racing me for position, so he'd have less time to come around and make up a whole lap. And of course, by then, some of the backmarker cars were so weak he had no problem in getting past them. But... I wasn't there to take advantage.

Now Mario has gone from the team, and I guess a lot of people think that's because he wiped me out for the second time in four races. That's not the case. What happened in Milwaukee was the icing on the cake, it wasn't the whole deal.

What Neil [Micklewright, Forsythe's VP of Operations] said in the press release last week was correct: it was an engineering issue. Mario did a lot of manoeuvring over the winter to get his engineer of choice, Michael Cannon [his engineer at HVM Racing], and then led his side of the team down a path that was basically reverting the car back to 2003 spec.

Well, Forsythe's spent all this money on wind-tunnel work and damper programmes, differential dynos, and so on - a long, long way away from the window in which Mario wanted to run the car.

The team wanted to accommodate him, and get him the engineer that he wanted and let him get back to basics, but completely changing the car and refusing to come back to where the team's migrated to in terms of set-ups over the past couple of seasons just isn't the way forward. And really it was becoming a conflict in the engineering department.

One side of the team wasn't learning from the other - and to even talk about a team having different sides is not healthy, is it? But that's how it was: one team actually operating like two separate teams.

Then at Long Beach Mario takes a bunch of people out including me. Then Houston happened and he threw away a race win, and then there was Milwaukee. Like I said, icing on the cake. I feel bad for Mario, he's a nice guy and I have no problem with him, but the Milwaukee screw-up was just the end of a whole sequence of circumstances.

Gerald Forsythe and Mario Dominguez © LAT

So now we're seventh in the championship with 59 points and Sebastien has 136, and ideally it's time to go for broke, go for the win every time. But first of all, we've got to get our team capable of doing that again because we're just not at the level we were last year. Sure, I'd like to say that we're gonna go out and kick ass and win the next five races but our team is not operating at the level that Newman/Haas and RuSPORT are.

And there are some things happening right now that I don't think are going to be productive for the team short-term. We've lost a guy who was a problem for us and replaced him with a guy who's been displaced from his team for being a problem and having an attitude problem: AJ Allmendinger. So it's going to be a little bit of a work in progress as the team tries to figure out this situation, because our team wasn't designed to operate the same way as RuSPORT.

We don't have driver coaches, we don't have psychology guys to keep the drivers' heads screwed on straight, our team doesn't cuddle drivers when they're pissed off. Drivers get on with the job - that's what we're there to do.

It's gonna be interesting to see how this is going to work out. I've been around AJ a long time, I've known him since he was 16 years old and he's a nice kid but with an extremely bad temper. Once his button gets hit, it's not a firecracker that goes off, it's a nuclear explosion.

For example, in Mexico City last year, I blocked him which happens to drivers all the time, and I admitted I blocked him, both publicly and to his face. But an hour later he's still fire-in-the-eyes about it. I mean, ultimately what he was most pissed off about was that Justin [Wilson] had dusted him off that race.

He has to learn that there's always the chance that there will be drivers who are quicker than him on a given day, and then work on getting better, constructively raise the level of his game.

At the moment, he can qualify in second place, but if it's behind his team-mate, it's a complete drama. I think he's too hyper-sensitive when gauging his performance to his team-mate, pays too much attention to it. And he hasn't been able to really focus on where he needs to improve because he's busy getting upset that Justin Wilson's ahead of him.

AJ got thrust into this series pretty quickly - he went from Barber Dodge, to Atlantics and then Champ Cars. Justin Wilson, on the other hand, is guy who's been around a lot. Over in Europe he's raced Formula Ford, Formula Vauxhall, Formula Palmer Audi, Formula 3000, and been successful all the way through. Then he had a year racing in Formula One. So he arrived in this series with a lot of experience in knowing what he wants and how to achieve it.

We need someone who will work with the team and for the team, and maybe AJ will fit into that, but I know right now that Forsythe is not going to accept any of the tantrums that have gone on at his previous team.

Maybe this is a positive thing for AJ, a wake-up call. He needs to accept that the focus on any team is going to eventually swing towards the guy that's getting the better results, and that's precisely what was going to be laid out to Mario after the race - 'Paul's committed to five years with the team, he's the focus and you start playing the game or things are going to change.'

It just so happened that Carl Russo dropped the bomb about AJ, and everyone knee-jerk reacted to it, and now he's here. Well the same thing's going to be laid out to AJ as was laid out to Mario: this team is built around Paul and you either accept that or you find a drive elsewhere. Whether he can deal with that remains to be seen, and whether he chooses to conform to that is really up to him.

AJ Allmendinger reacts after failing to finish the race in San Jose in 2005 © LAT

What's happened to AJ, I think needs to be a lesson to him, not a golden parachute for him where he gets thrown out of one deal and ends up with a possibly better deal. If our team gets everything sorted out, we have the potential to be a lot stronger. But the management here is not going to tolerate the shenanigans that went on at RuSPORT.

Maybe some of the problems he had there were because they let him get away with a certain way of behaving, and when you do it once, it's hard to break that habit.

Obviously I want to see AJ succeed, but first and foremost I'm going to concentrate on what I need to do. I'm a different guy to say, Jimmy [Vasser]: I'm not going to be a driving coach or someone who helps others learn the ropes. Ultimately it's not my job to hold AJ's hand and be his go-to guy. He's gotta figure that out himself.

What I can do is lead by example. I've been in the series 16 years and have only been let go by one team, Penske, and that's because it just wasn't working. Every other team I've been at I chose to be there, and I didn't stay in the series this long by being difficult or hard to work with. So I'll be myself and be professional and AJ can watch and learn.

Someone who doesn't need to learn is Carl Russo's new choice of teammate for Justin, Cristiano da Matta. He's proven what he's capable of doing, he's worked with Newman/Haas, and - to take nothing away from him - he was also the first benefactor of the Newman/Haas dominance in 2002. He moved on to F1, never really got with it, and then came back to Champ Car with PKV and had a hard time getting back to where he once was.

Were his 2002 performances down to the car or the driver? We know from Oriol Servia last year that the moment a driver gets in a Newman/Haas car, he's instantly at the front: From nowhere, Oriol he was suddenly front-row starting every weekend, podium finishing every weekend, and now he's back to the middle of the pack. It will be interesting to see how Cristiano will go now that he's back in a real competitive drive.

A few people are sympathising with Dale Coyne for losing his number one driver for the second year on the bounce but that's just the way this business is. He's not the kind of guy to stand in the way of a driver who gets a bigger opportunity.

I think Dale does a good job with the equipment he has, and he's helped a lot of guys get the opportunity to springboard to another programme. Whether he'd want to be called the Paul Stoddart of Champ Car, I don't know, but he certainly seems to be the guy that a lot of drivers get their first chance with, or rebound with, and get their career kick-started. And I hope he finds a good driver to replace da Matta.

Some of these questions should get answered this weekend at Portland. Historically it isn't one of my best tracks, but I've qualified well there over the past couple of years, and had a half-decent test there in April. We weren't the fastest car on track but we were steadily in the top four.

We have some ideas going into the race, and hopefully AJ can contribute some technical information because the RuSPORT cars were very quick there last year. We just have to get the team back on track and start scoring some good points. A golden opportunity to win was lost at Milwaukee but we have ten races to go, and we need to get the team focused on getting back to the winners' circle.

It won't be easy. Cristiano won there last year for PKV, and although it was pit strategy that got him to the front, once he was there he was fast. So now combined with a RuSPORT car, he's gonna come in with all guns blazing to show he's back. So I'd expect both RuSPORT cars to be competitive. And Newman/Haas needless to say.

As we've seen, anything can happen, but it's time things started going for, rather than against, Forsythe. We need to start getting top results - and I mean right now.

PT