Paul Position

Just when you start thinking the season couldn't get any worse...

To clear up the confusion as to why I won't be racing in Mexico, let's set the record straight. What actually happened was that I had a couple of beers while watching [Juan Pablo] Montoya in the Busch race on TV, and had started to fall asleep. So I decided to go out on an ATV on the desert trails at the back of my house.

The end result wasn't pretty. I misjudged a bump, and suddenly the freakin' thing had its way with me like a 300-pound man in San Quentin. On top.

So I have a fractured right scapula and I'm going to miss the final race of the season. I had to go to the SEMA show in Las Vegas with this sling around me, and before I knew it there were five different versions of what happened. But now you know the story.

What's annoying is that, even with the fracture, I might have been OK. It happened two Saturdays ago, and through the following Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we were making progress. Then last Thursday I overstepped the exercise and made the situation much worse; the muscles have gone into lock down to protect the bone and I can't lift a damn thing now.

I guess if it was going to happen, it was best that it happened in a season that has been a train-wreck from start to finish for me. It's going to be a strange-looking grid in Mexico: Buddy Rice and David Martinez driving the Forsythe cars, me not there, AJ [Allmendinger] not there, and possibly Adam Carroll standing in for Justin [Wilson] at RuSPORT.

Of course the reason Buddy's at Forsythe this weekend has been the big story since the last time I wrote to you. Bye-bye AJ. He's decided to take the money and run to NASCAR, and so Jerry told him not to bother turning up for Mexico.

I can't go into the figures involved, but from what I hear AJ's management was hard-lining at a basic figure over double what Jerry was prepared to offer, and with a bonus programme that guaranteed him another 33 per cent on that. Jerry said "There's absolutely no way. If you have another offer that's gonna net you that much money then you go ahead and take it." They kept coming back at him saying "Well what's your best offer?" and Jerry says "I've made you my best offer!"

We still needed an American in the series, though, and Buddy has a good technical brain and he was out of contract at Rahal Letterman, so he was the ideal replacement. I offered to go and help him down at MSR Houston where he and Martinez tested last week, but after the accident I couldn't go. So I wish them the best of luck this weekend. Someone's gotta prevent [Sebastien] Bourdais from running off with the race...

So, back to AJ. Is NASCAR what he wants to do? Maybe right now he thinks it is, but I think he got boxed into this, but now he's gotta dive into doing this every week - testing, racing, live there, be at the shop every day. It is your whole life. I don't think he's thought about anything except the money. Genuinely I wish the kid luck. But after doing so badly at Texas Motor Speedway - he failed to qualify for what was supposed to be his Nextel Cup debut - he's going to realise it's a lot harder than he was expecting...

Look at the history of start-up teams, and they just don't go well straight out of the box. The only one with some success is Ray Evernham, and that was on the back of crewing for Jeff Gordon's championships, so he had the set-up sheets and the experience to make it work and US$100 million injected from Dodge. In that context, you'd say his hit rate was pretty moderate really.

And then there's the driving side, potential backlash from his rivals. AJ's gonna be facing drivers who have gone through the whole system of ARCA, Truck, Busch and how are they going to react to some open-wheel guy with a cocky attitude coming straight into Cup? They're automatically going to be thinking, "Okay, I'm gonna show this little fucker what's up."

Guys like Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart - very, very talented drivers, very, very experienced and with huge budgets behind them, and there are still times when they struggle. It's not all about how good a driver you are, as he has now proven all too clearly. The whole field was separated by six or seven tenths at TMS, and he was like 1.5 seconds off.

On the morning before qualifying, I got a smartass text message from him saying, "Hey PT, what kind of plane should I buy?" So I was sitting watching qualifying and he didn't make the cut, so I sent him back a message, "Forget planes, I'd start worrying about how to fucking qualify. Bill Elliott outqualified you, and you told me he sucks." Strangely enough, I never heard anything back from him.

In Trucks, there are six or seven that are good, the rest mediocre. Busch has 30 good cars, the rest are mediocre. In Nextel Cup, they all have good equipment, and they all know what they're doing, whereas AJ's in a start-up team. I mean, it is tough out there. I'm not exaggerating when I say he could be hard-pressed to make the races next year.

AJ Allmendinger (Toyota Tundra) ahead of Mark Martin (Ford F-150) © LAT

AJ's gonna show up at Daytona with maybe 60 cars going for 43 grid slots. Thirty-five of those are guaranteed based on team-owner points, which he won't have. Then there are another two set aside for past champions, so you have maybe 25 drivers going for the six remaining slots, which they can do through success in the Gatorade 150 races... And remember, these drivers have been doing this shit their whole racing careers...

So if he doesn't get on the grid at Daytona, well once you're in that spiral and miss the first couple of races and you're not in that top 35, it starts getting impossible. Look at Robby Gordon: he has a lot of experience in those things now, and great equipment, and last year he was often not making races. A few of those he was fast enough to get in, but got bumped out because he wasn't in the top 35.

AJ's just got in this deal where he's making a lot of money, but if he doesn't start making the race, he's gonna get spat out real quick. He might not have thought this far ahead before, but I bet you he's thinking about it now.

You can't drive simply for money. You've gotta do it because it's what you love to do, and that's why I've stayed in Champ Cars. Granted, I do get paid well, but I get paid well because I've stayed loyal to Champ Car.

In 15 years, apart from my debut race, I've only been with four teams, and I now have the sort of relationship with Jerry that I can only compare to what Rick Mears has with Roger Penske.

Jerry has afforded me the opportunity to do what I want to do, he has paid me what I feel is fair to be paid, and when I've finished racing, he'll probably have something else for me to do. There's a loyalty factor, and you get rewarded for that.

You may remember I had a deal to do seven Busch races next year? Well, I've cancelled that program and kinda handed it over to Max Papis, who's been trying to get into NASCAR. I'm 100 per cent behind Champ Car and behind our team, and I want to show that.

I've been thinking about this the past month or so. As you're all aware, this season hasn't exactly gone the way we wanted, and ever since the test I had with Childress you could argue that once you get a couple of things going on, you're not focused 100 per cent on what you should be focused on.

Jerry showed me loyalty in signing me on a long-term deal, and so it's only right that I show him the same commitment in return. I'll do Daytona 24 Hours with Michael Shank again, probably with Max, and probably some kid from England called Ian James. And if I can set up an ALMS prototype ride for Sebring 12 Hours too, then I'll do that. But you know that's all done by February. I'm not going to do Le Mans, because that's mid-season, and I'm not going to do stuff that distracts me from trying to win the Champ Car title.

We're gonna restructure the team next year, move some people around, and try and win the next championship, and the next championship. With a new car, this is a perfect opportunity for me and the team to have a big comeback. Jerry's even told me he's in no real hurry over the second car. If he has to have all 60 employees focusing just on my car next year in order to win the championship, then that's what he'll do.

Paul Tracy and the infamous chicane obstacles © LAT

That's the future. I better get you up to date with what happened in Surfers Paradise.

The first day was obviously a disaster. No one was in agreement with Tony Cotman [Champ Car VPO] over the set-up for the chicanes and whether we should have tyre barrels or not. I was the first one to push the limit there and ended up paying for it. I touched one of them, it ripped the front suspension off, and with no steering I went into the wall at about 100mph. I went to the spare car for qualifying, but it wasn't ready to run, which was... disappointing.

Basically, after the shunt, there was two hours of work to do on the spare, in an hour and a half. It had no set-up on it, it didn't have the right diff, didn't have the right shocks, and so on.

And then, 10 minutes before the pre-qualifying session, it won't start. The engine hadn't been run since Elkhart. It was just full of fuel: some kind of diaphragm in the vee for the fuel pressure had split open and the motor was just full right up to the pop-off valve. It wouldn't even turn over. These operational fuck-ups are the things that have to be sorted if you want to be a championship contender. We've got to get it sorted for next year so we hit the ground running with the new car.

So Saturday was a day we had to bounce back, and we ran good in practice and then qualifying. If Will Power hadn't got fastest time of the Saturday, we'd have been on the front row. But he did, so that meant we started behind him and Bourdais, whose time from Friday was quicker than my time from Saturday. Pisser, but OK, Friday was a quicker day and we'd accounted for ourselves that day.

What did annoy me on the Saturday was that AJ and I were running in convoy during qualifying, and [Oriol] Servia comes out of the pits in front of us, and he lets AJ through and not me. He held me up for three quarters of a lap. So I backed off from him and then went for another lap but ended up catching him again and still he wouldn't let me by. His excuse was that he had to get a lap in too. But if that's the way he wants to play it, then fine, but he shouldn't bitch about others doing the same to him.

The race start was a bit of a mix-up. Cotman had asked for a car's length between each row of the grid, and I reckon certainly in the first half of the field we were about as perfect as it's possible to be, but I think someone further back had gone to sleep during the pace lap, so they yellow flagged that lap and sent us round again. So in the end we had to go single-file, which isn't very interesting for the spectators and not too exciting for the drivers either, especially as we aren't allowed to use the Push to Pass before the first corner.

We had a pretty good race going, and we'd managed to get round Bourdais when he screwed up one of the chicanes, and I was able to just go clean round the outside of him at the next turn. But then it all went wrong at the pitstops.

I'd obviously got to the pits before AJ, so I also needed to leave it before he did, and his pitbox was in front of me. His fuel hose had a big loop in it right in front of me, and I obviously didn't want to run over that or his wheel gun, so I kicked the tail out as I was leaving my pitbox, and I went sideways into the fast lane straight away, just as Will Power was coming through.

Paul Tracy (Forsythe) clashes with Will Power (Team Australia) in the pits © LAT

That collision punctured my right rear tyre, and knocked one of his flugel wings off. Contrary to what Bourdais says - that I crippled Will's car - it probably took about 100lbs of downforce off, not a big deal.

So I had to limp back to the pits and go out of sequence, but then it all started working out beautifully. Without really having to pass anyone, we were able to get through into the top five because they were making errors, and Oriol had his gearbox problem. So my reds were still fairly fresh, and when the cars ahead of me pitted, and because I was out of sequence, I had a few laps to lay down some decent times before my stop. That's when I got the fastest lap of the race and made up a whole bunch of time on everyone.

I pitted and came out in front of Nelson Philippe. I was now back to blacks, which were still cold, and he was on warmed up reds, so I had to give him the room when he went for the pass. It didn't bother me, because I knew how quick we were and my blacks were going to last a lot better than Nelson's reds. We were in good shape for the win...

And then came two penalties for I don't know what. For the record, I'll explain it again.

We were under yellow because a couple of backmarkers had spun, and I was coming down into Turn 1 and could see out of the corner of my eye Mario Dominguez was coming out of the pits at a hell of a speed, and we'd probably reach the chicane at just about the same time, with me a little bit ahead but we'd probably collide. So I thought I'd take the sensible option of driving through the chicane. And then I get a call that I have to give way to Dominguez, because apparently I passed him under yellows...

Obviously I wasn't happy about this, but I did what I was told and just decided I'd have to pass him on the restart. Well, I then tried a move on him that I admit was optimistic, it wasn't really on. So when I realised this, and we'd arrived at the chicane side-by-side, I had two options: one was to force the issue and crash into him, the other was drive through the chicane but back off and make sure he was still ahead.

I thought I was doing the right thing, by taking the second option. But then I get word that now I have to back off to let Alex Tagliani through! To put it mildly, I wasn't too happy with the officiating. After backing off like I did when I realised my pass wasn't going to work, I was still the same distance behind Mario that I had been before I went into the chicane, so how the fuck could shortcutting the chicane have given me time on Alex? It's just not logical.

So twice I deliberately shortcut the chicane in order to avoid a collision, and twice I get punished for it. Did they rather I hit the Rocketsports car? Shit, it's like you're damned if you don't, damned if you do.

It's one thing to go out there and make up time by shortcutting a chicane, but if you give back the track position and time, it makes no sense for Race Control to just randomly change the freakin' running order! Manipulated racing is not what this should be about. The charitable view is that Tony Cotman made a massively bad call. Am I feeling charitable? No.

Paul Tracy at speed at Surfers Paradise, Australia © LAT

I don't think Cotman's done enough this year as far as making calls is concerned, and then he seems to do it all in one weekend. It's like a cop that doesn't give out tickets for a whole month because he doesn't like doing the paperwork, and then on the last day of the month he decides to give out 20 tickets just to fulfil his quota.

I tell you, I was so mad for hours after that race, I could hardly speak. I just felt like jacking it in. Even members from rival teams thought that what happened was shitty. I reckon even Bourdais might have been on my side too, but he was too busy telling anyone he could that it was my fault that he had taken the local hero Will Power out of the race. Go figure.

His reasoning was that I had damaged the Team Australia car in our pitlane collision, and because it was so crippled, that's what allowed him to close up on Will. This is pure Bourdais Bull, as Will can confirm: he said he could barely feel any difference to his car after our collision, and everyone was saving fuel behind Charles Zwolsman. That's why Bourdais was able to close up on him.

All hail the champion for coming up with that fantastic explanation for his own fuck-up. I'm gonna really miss him this weekend.

PT