Paul Position

Do you feel honoured? You're reading the words of the new hero of Quebec! Okay, maybe not quite 'hero', but it looks like I won them over. Judging by the reception I got on the podium at Montreal, I don't think I could have been more popular if I'd been Jean-Paul Tracy. And considering the treatment I got when I first arrived in the city, that's pretty good.

They had quotes from my last Paul Position column all over ESPN's Sportscentre on Thursday evening - and then they had Sebastien Bourdais' replies from a press conference, telling the Quebecois to give me the reception I deserved.

The comments about Frenchmen keeping their helmets on when they fight didn't upset Nelson Philippe, who is pretty easy-going, and Alex Tagliani took it as a joke - he's fairly easy-going too, likes to have fun. But Sebastien wasn't happy, and obviously saw an opportunity to get the people of Quebec against me.

Well, what was I gonna do? I had two options: sit in the truck and hide away, or do something to win the crowd over. Well, there was only one way for me to deal with it, and that's interact - sign autographs, speak to the fans, pose for pictures and so on.

Then when they saw me in pitlane, when they booed, I'd take a bow, and when they were jeering me as I drove out onto the track, I was waving to them. They had those guys play-fighting in the stand, one with a helmet on, and I hammed it up too, wearing that cap with the fleur de lis on it, and then on the driver's parade wearing that wrestler's mask and cape. Gradually, we turned it around.

Of course, Sebastien was asked what he thought of my behaviour and he said 'If he wants to act like an idiot, then that's his choice.' Good to see him enter the spirit! He was just twisted that all the cameras were on me down in fourth place in that parade, and weren't on him as pole position man.

I do want to make one thing clear though: as much as Sebastien and I don't get along personally, I've never said he's not a great driver, and I think he deserves a shot at Formula One. There are rumours out there that he wants to test for BMW next year but only if he is guaranteed a race drive in '08. He's always made it clear that he wants to get to F1, and being from Europe that's what every race driver wants. I think he deserves a chance to show what he can do.

Assuming he wins the title this year, there's nothing left for him to achieve over here. He'll have won three titles on the bounce, a bunch of wins, a bunch of poles and he starts each season as the main guy for the championship. He's done everything he could do here, and in his plans Champ Car was never the final stop for him, it was just a stepping stone to Formula One.

For me, the opportunity to go to Formula One - at least with a proper deal - never really came around, so this has been the final stop for me. But I hope Sebastien gets a chance. If you can go into Formula One with a kinda C-level team, which is what BMW are at the moment, and you can score points within the first couple of races like Mark Webber did and Robert Kubica did, suddenly you're King Ding-a-ling, God's gift, and you've made it. Scoring points in a shitty car secures you a multi-million dollar contract. Is Sebastien capable of doing that? For sure.

Talking of Formula One, I'm pretty impressed with how the Champ Car times looked compared to F1 cars at Montreal. Sebastien's pole time was only five seconds off Alonso, and our track conditions were pretty shitty on the Saturday. We've got a six-year-old car that's 400lb heavier, steel brakes instead of carbon, we have no traction control, we've got spec tyres so no ultra-soft rubber, and an annual budget of less than five per cent of the top F1 teams...

Like I predicted in our last column, left-foot braking made a huge difference for me at Montreal. I'd always struggled at that track, I'd never qualified as high as fourth in our previous visits there, because I couldn't brake as late as the other guys, and at that track, the time is all made up in the braking zones there. This year I had a couple of mishaps under braking, but nothing major.

Then the rain came and we had that horrible messy Sunday. I think we had to start the race on Sunday because the fans were there, but once it started to rain harder, I think it was also the correct decision to stop it. There was so much rain and spray coming at you if you weren't in the lead, that I actually had water on the inside of my visor and I couldn't see a damn thing.

Tracy during the aborted Sunday race © LAT

So they made the right call, and the rain got worse and worse. The last thing you want is to run around behind the pace car for half the race. It's a shame for the spectators who couldn't turn up Monday, but at least we eventually got a race in.

We weren't as quick as Newman/Haas, but we ended up with second place. On the last pitstop we didn't get as much fuel in the car as we wanted, so I had to spend four or five laps going easy, getting the fuel consumption on target. As a result, the tyres wouldn't come up to pressure, because they weren't being worked hard enough, so Nelson Philippe and Sebastien were driving away from me, but I had a big gap to the cars behind me and Nelson was out of sequence anyway, so we got second. I just needed a decent result, so to finish second on a track that was almost equal to Portland as being a bad one for me was pretty good.

Although we've never gone great there, I am very sad that it seems it will be our last visit to the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. It's a fantastic track. But if the track promoter doesn't want us there, what can you do? Now we have Alan Labrosse, who promoted this race, working hard for us to try and find a new venue in the area, possibly the Mirabel airport, which has shut down. It's just on the east of Montreal city, so it could be good.

Now we head to three tracks where we have gone well in the past - in fact I've had pole positions and victories at Road America, Surfers Paradise and Mexico City, so I'm looking to score really strongly, salvage something from this wreck of a season. What Forsythe Championship Racing needs, above all, is reliability.

Last race AJ dropped out with a halfshaft failures, the race before we had our fuel pick-up problem, race before that we both had major braking issues.... Those are the kind of problems our team has that just makes it so hard for us to compete with Newman/Haas over the course of a whole season. Sebastien's car doesn't have failures like that. The finishing rate for that particular car is flawless. We can't drop out of races and expect to claw it back against someone who doesn't have reliability problems.

When we get the new Panoz DP01, that's what we at Forsythe need to work on. There are bound to be a few gremlins with a new car, so I think we need to work on not so much the performance end of the car, but just reliability.

What else is new? Well, I've signed up to do more NASCAR Busch races next year, somewhere between five and seven races, depending on how much money my sponsor Sport Clips is going to put in. It will be with a new team though, Riley-d'Hondt Motorsports, and I think it's a good programme - Bill Riley is a good team owner, and Eddie d'Hondt was the team manager at Robert Yates.

My goal is to get all the races in before the start of the Champ Car season. Last Sunday, I did the Busch race at California Speedway, and I hadn't driven a stock car in three months, hadn't driven one on that track before, and the only comparable track I had raced a stock car on was Michigan where I did a test... a year ago. I mean it's hard enough for the regular guys to be competitive in that series, and they're driving the cars for four days a week, every week. For me it's been like five times as difficult.

Tracy in the Busch race at Fontana © LAT

I haven't laid out our Busch schedule because we haven't had the final Champ Car schedule through yet, but ideally I'd like to do my five races back-to-back in order to get in the groove. We'll show better that way.

Getting accustomed to something different is something Dario Franchitti will have to do at Elkhart if the rumours about him joining RuSPORT are true. It's hardly like he's a complete novice at this though... I've been asking him for four years when would he come back and do the sort of racing he loves on street and road courses. It wouldn't be out of line for me to say I don't think he was really enjoying what he was doing in IndyCars, but the money was good. I think it's what he wants to do.

I think he'll find it tough though, because if you look at the No10 RuSPORT car, AJ wasn't able to do a great job in it, but he came to Forsythe and immediately started winning races. Then Cristiano struggled in it too. So I think RuSPORT have got some set-up issues. As we've said before, they lose rear grip and burn the tyres off, and I know from being his teammate at Team Green that Dario doesn't like a real nervous car - he likes good power-down, and is happier with a more understeering car.

But although I like Dario and I'm pleased to see him coming back, I can't concern myself too much with his problems when we get to Road America. My first win of the year is a little overdue. It's time to put the hammer down.

PT