Paul Position

I expected this week's column to be one of our usual 2006 things - shooting the breeze about some positives and negatives from our last couple of races, and hopefully giving you fans a bit of insight that you can't get in regular race reports. That's the basic idea of this stuff.

But this time around, it just can't be that way: our little Champ Car world has a big, dark cloud over it because of what happened to one of our ex-champions during our test at Road America last week. Cristiano da Matta hit a deer at almost 100mph. As I write this, he's being gradually brought out of his induced coma, a process which I understand can take three or four days. And we've all got our fingers crossed for him.

In 16 years in Champ Cars, I've seen some huge accidents, even some fatalities. But what happened to Cristiano was the craziest freakin' thing I've ever seen in my life. I was in the pit when it happened, and first thing I heard was that he'd hit a baby deer. I thought 'oh, no big deal'; it had taken a corner off the car, but cars are fixable.

Then I heard it was a full adult deer, and it was a lot more serious than just a wreck. I jumped in my hire car and went up to the corner. But the Champ Car Safety Team told us 'don't come by'. When Dr Chris Pinderski, [Champ Car's Director of Medical Affairs] came down the pits later, everyone was all over him asking him how da Matta was, and he said, 'It's not looking good.' Apparently Cristiano never regained consciousness, and had a huge contusion on his forehead, where the deer had hit his helmet.

When I say it was a weird thing to happen, I'm not just talking about the fact that there were only 12 cars at the track and it's Champ Car's longest circuit - over four miles. It's the fact that it's unusual for a deer to show itself in the open like that. The chances are greater in the spring or the fall, when the temperatures are cooler. The chances are greater in the morning or evening, because again the temperatures are cooler. In those circumstances, I guess it's a normal occurrence that a deer would be crossing the track: the circuit's surrounded by woodland shade, after all.

But there we were in the middle of the summer and in the heat of the afternoon - it was about 3pm local time, and about 90°F. Very, very rarely do you ever see deer in those circumstances: they'd normally be laying in the woods and keeping cool. Unless somebody or something chased it or scared it out of the woods.

Jesus, the thing jumped over a six or seven foot fence and then over the wall, and right in front of Cristiano. They reckon he hit it between 90 and 100mph and with his crash helmet. Well, you probably know, a full-size deer will write off your road car at 60, so the impact is something you don't really wanna think about.

So yeah, you can argue it was a freak accident, but everyone has got to start thinking of ways that this could be prevented. I think any time we test at Road America, the organisers should go shake the bushes, send out hunters.

Our cars are capable of 200mph, so if there's a possibility of deer on the track, we need to minimise that, clear the woods of wildlife as much as possible. A day before the test, the organisers should have the deer scared away a mile or two. It's fairly standard procedure for race tracks that have this kind of issue.

I know, that sort of thing costs money, but the race track has spent tons of money there. I don't know if you've seen it, but the giant hill that used to be behind the trucks that leads up to the motorhomes and hospitality area has now been levelled flat and has been blacktopped.

The whole hill has been bulldozed away and the paddock has been repaved. I'd say it was at least a half-million dollar job. Whether that was needed, I don't know. But maybe some chain-link fences around the track to keep animals out would have been more appropriate.

After the accident, no one in authority could make a decision about cancelling the test; no one seemed to know what was going on. I talked to Neil [Micklewrigth, Forsythe Championship Racing's VP of Operations] on the phone and Forsythe decided we were gonna pull out of the test out of respect to Cristiano and his RuSPORT team.

We talked to Tony Cotman [Champ Car VP of Operations] about that, and said we believed it was the right decision to take a step back and analyse the situation, rather than just say 'Oh, it was a freak accident, one in a million chance,' and just go ahead and run again.

Paul Tracy and Alex Tagliani discuss their incident in San Jose © LAT

As things turned out, it seems it was only us and RuSPORT who pulled out, and I was a little disappointed in that.

I think it would be fair to say the whole Champ Car community feels pretty shitty right now. Certainly it makes me realise that worrying about my own stupid issues doesn't really mean too much. However, for the record, I suppose I better cover our last two races, as I last wrote to you after Toronto.

In Edmonton, qualifying was good, and we got on the front row and would have had pole, only my quickest lap was deleted for causing a red flag when my gearbox seized and I spun. The race was only okay because I had a bad set of tyres that didn't come up to pressure in the second stint. That caused me to spin and so I slipped from third to fifth. Nothing to write home about, but at least we had made progress in qualifying.

San Jose we were looking for some good things, but I arrived at the track to find the top of my motorhome had been peeled off by a low tree-branch that had cut into the roof like a tin-opener. A half a million dollar motorhome that's missing a roof set the tone for our whole weekend.

We had good speed in qualifying and we got on the front row again, but throughout the weekend both AJ and I had major braking issues - problems with them overheating, so we were getting longer and longer brake-pedal travel. So we tried running bigger brake ducts to cool the discs, but they did too good a job: on the long pit straight, they got too cool, so then when we suddenly heated them up under braking for the hairpin - where we're going from 175mph down to 25 - the discs were cracking.

Our problems became pretty obvious in the race - we were just smoking the brakes out within 10 laps of going hard. I went down an escape road once, lost a couple of positions, and recovered. Then, mid-race, I went down there again, got in a bit of a panic about losing a whole load of positions because everyone had been bunched together by a recent full-course yellow, so I gunned it out of the escape road, thinking I could get ahead of Alex Tagliani... I guess you know the rest - the split-second decision was the wrong decision, and I hit him pretty hard.

The fight with me and Alex in the pitlane was just one of those unfortunate situations. He was really upset - understandable, I suppose - and I was trying to defuse the situation but he didn't hear what I had to say and kept on grabbing me and getting confrontational. So

I had to put a stop to it. My old man said afterwards 'I wouldn't have even let him touch me once before decking him'!

Anyway, it's all cleared up now. My wife Patti and Alex's wife Bronte are really good friends, and that had brought Alex and I closer together. We live near to each other too, and Patty and Bronte go to the same gym. In fact, within a couple of hours of the race, Bronte was texting Patty saying 'Do you want to work out together tomorrow? Meet you in Starbucks', and so on. So that kinda broke the ice between Alex and I, and we talked together on the Monday morning and everything was cool.

Paul Tracy at Road America © LAT

And then there was the Elkhart Lake test... The one good thing that came out of the laps I did round Road America was that I've started my left-foot braking campaign. I think I'm the only guy in Champ Car who right-foot brakes, and it loses you time into braking zones because you mentally build in time from transferring your right foot from throttle. It's definitely something worth sorting before we get the Panoz DP01 next year, because the future of racing cars is with paddle-shifts and just two pedals.

I only got one day of testing it, obviously, and I had a couple of offs at medium-speed corners into gravel traps, getting the feel for the braking pressure required. Going down into the hard braking turns at Elkhart, like Turn 5, where you have to really stand on the anchors is not a problem. But medium-speed corners were harder, knowing whether I was braking too hard or too light, and when it locked, I couldn't get it to unlock very easily.

It's not 100 per cent yet, but I'm getting there. By the end of our test, I had it down pretty good, so I've got to try and stick with it now and keep working at it. I've driven my whole career braking with my right foot, and my street car I brake with my right as well, so I don't really have the sensory feel in my left yet. Definitely I can brake a lot later with the left than I could with the right, because there isn't that transition time of coming off one pedal on to another.

Anyway, I don't wanna dwell on my races or anything like that because there are much bigger issues at the moment with Cristiano. I mean, I could talk about the fact that I got docked seven points for colliding with Alex at San Jose. But, you know, bearing in mind what's happened since then, I really couldn't give a shit.

PT