Paul Position

Progress! This was the theme of our race weekend in Toronto. Forsythe Championship Racing made progress with the car, made progress with our understanding of the car, and I've made progress in the championship. That second place finish has moved us from 11th in the standings up to sixth, and just a couple of points away from fourth.

I love racing in Toronto, but not everything was good news when I first got there this year. The first lap shunt in Cleveland still seemed to be the big talking point, because Sebastien Bourdais had decided to blame me for it, saying I was trying to kill him and so on.

This is fairly typical of him. I hadn't come down on anyone's side, and I hadn't tried to blame anyone either - I just described it as a racing incident. I even called Sebastien in the week after Cleveland and wanted to talk about it, because I didn't want this sort of shit to happen, and for us to have a big battle through the media, but he never returned my call.

Then I get into Toronto, and suddenly the media are running to me telling me "Bourdais says you tried to kill him," and all that kinda crap. That's just the way he is.

If anyone was at fault, I'd still say it was Bruno [Junqueira], because he moved the hardest, over to the left, so there was no more room. But I'm not going to point the finger because I don't think he knew Sebastien was on the other side of me, and also he was probably checking his mirror looking for me, and when you do that you automatically move to the side you're looking.

It was just an accident, and happened so fast that no one should be blamed, in my opinion. That's not the way Sebastien works, however: he has to blame someone - it sure as hell isn't gonna be himself, and it won't be his teammate. Which leaves me. Great.

One guy from one of the Toronto papers - I'm not going to give him any publicity by naming him - used Bourdais' comments for his own agenda, which from what I can see is to be controversial. He really gets off on that. The gist of it was that I'm too old, too fat, too much of an idiot to be driving Champ Cars. He did the same hatchet job on Jacques Villeneuve a couple of weeks earlier when the F1 guys were in Montreal - too old, can't keep up, he should go and play music, etc.

This guy isn't a motorsport writer: he's one of these general sports writers that writes like two articles a year about auto-racing whenever there's a race on the east side of Canada. He wrote about Michael Clemons, the football coach of the Toronto Argonauts, who is about one of the nicest guys on the planet, and really fan-friendly, and he just laid into him, too. So I don't take a lot of interest in what he has to say, but I was happy to prove him wrong.

The one down-side of our race weekends from the technical standpoint is that Eric [Zeto, race engineer] and I are still struggling in qualifying on the option tyres, the softer-compound Bridgestones.

These reds are still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. We just can't get the lap time improvements that everyone else seems to get. Hell, we can't even get the same lap times as we do on blacks - in both practice days, I went faster on blacks than I did on reds. In fact, we were P1 when everyone was running blacks, then we switch over and the other top runners are making that leap forward that we're not.

It gives a little more understeer, but not enough to affect the lap times. It's the feedback to the driver that's wrong. I leave the pits and I feel I have more grip than I have on blacks, comparing cold tyres to cold tyres. But as they come up to temperature, that's where the problem lies.

The blacks, despite being harder, allow you to feel where the limit is. The reds feel softer, sure, but... how can I put this? It's like I've got Gummi Bears or snot or something under the tyres; I can't feel the limit, there's no security in it. It feels inconsistent, like it's changing all the time, and so I struggle to get the lap time because I don't trust the tyre. Maybe it comes down to tyre pressures.

So we wound up qualifying fourth, behind Justin Wilson, my teammate AJ Allmendinger, and alongside Bourdais. Thankfully you can still overtake in Champ Cars, and so outside of the second row of the grid isn't a disaster, but it just leaves you too exposed to being compromised by other drivers screwing up at the start. On a narrow course like Toronto, there's not a lot of room to mess around with.

Still, we ended up retaining our position, and eventually I was being held up by Wilson and Bourdais. I was very surprised at how slow they were going - I think maybe Sebastien was trying to get super-mileage or something. But when the guys on the different fuel stop strategy at the front of the field - Nelson Philippe, Oriol Servia and Bruno Junqueira - went for their second stop, suddenly AJ got a clear track in front of him and was starting to disappear down the road, so I thought I better do something.

Paul Tracy, Forsythe Championship Racing © LAT

It was one of those races where we had 725bhp standard, and the extra power to pass was worth 75bhp, and I think that was a real help. Bourdais was expecting a move from me, because I had tried once as we came up to lap some traffic, and he managed to box me in so I couldn't get by. Then I tried again and he tried to block me, but I had enough overlap and momentum on him that he couldn't do it, and so I got through.

And then Justin. I didn't really expect him to be so easy to pass, but he was so slow on to the straight, and I was on the power-to-pass button on the exit of the corner, and we were past him on the straight and back on the racing line before we'd even reached the braking zone.

I don't know what Newman/Haas's problems were, because I was making great fuel mileage in the second half of the race and just drove away from Bourdais. Fuel consumption-wise, we were struggling early on, but then I figured how to get the best mileage, so once we got some clean air, our car was running well in terms of pace, fuel consumption, and I at least got a faster race lap than AJ.

Actually, at the end we were getting better consumption figures than AJ, too. I don't know how solid he was for fuel, but what I do know is that if Philippe and Servia hadn't crashed and caused that yellow, I would have been good to go to the end of the race without a splash 'n' dash.

Still, it's good: we scored the team's first 1-2 in about three years, and there's a real positive air at Forsythe at the moment. Jerry is spending and doing whatever we need to win. Michael Cannon [Allmendinger's race engineer] flew to the UK last week to use the Lola wind tunnel. And for three days before the Toronto race, we were on a shaker-rig at Dynamics in Ontario.

We have use of their facility, but we aren't allowed any help from them: we aren't partners like Newman/Haas are. There's a guy there who we can ask to do stuff for us, but he can't advise us. So it's Forsythe personnel, specifically Eric my race engineer, doing the work. We went up there and just threw all our different set-ups at it, the various spring and shock set-ups that we run, and started playing and fine-tuning it.

We haven't yet seen the benefits of what we've done up there, but the stuff we learned before Toronto, aero stuff, is being applied to the cars as I write this on Monday. It's all coming down the line, and some of it is for stuff that will be usable for next year's car, too. But I think we started to get a taste of the work in Toronto, and that helped us to our good result there. That's encouraging.

Looks like at the moment we're destined to finish fourth in the championship for the third year on the bounce, which is a bit of a pisser. I don't think we can completely close down the 55-point gap to Justin in third. But we'll give it a go.

We're only halfway through the season, and if RuSPORT suffers a similar run of luck as we had in the first half of the season, you never know. The fat lady's only just reached her dressing room.

PT