The Champ Car World Series has released its provisonal schedule for 2007.

April 8 - Las Vegas, Nevada – Street Course*
April 15 - Long Beach, California – Street Course
April 22 - Houston, Texas – Reliant Park
May 20 - Zhuhai, China – Road Course *
June 10 - Portland, Oregon – Portland International Raceway
June 24 - Cleveland, Ohio – Burke Lakefront Airport
July 1 - St. Jovite, Canada – Circuit Mont Tremblant
July 8 - Toronto, Canada – Exhibition Place
July 22 - Edmonton, Canada – City Centre Airport
July 29 - San Jose, California – Street Course
Aug. 12 - Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin – Road America
Aug. 19 - Denver, Colorado – Pepsi Center
Oct. 21 - Surfers Paradise, Australia – Street Course
Nov. 11 - Mexico City, Mexico – Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez
Dec. 2 - Phoenix, Arizona – Street Course*

*New races for 2007.

The season will be bookeneded by two new street course races in Las Vegas and Phoenix, an interesting development in two markets that already have well established oval speedways. The inclusion of a date in China shows another attempt by Champ Car to break into the expanding Asian market, but its place in the schedule seems like a logistics nightmare, I have to wonder why it wasn’t scheduled around the same time as the established Australian date so the teams could do one swing through the area rather than have two “fly away” races months apart. As expected the Montreal race date (which will most likely be taken over by a NASCAR Busch race) is being replaced by a race at the nearby Mont Tremblant road course.

Happy Birthday ex-Grand Prix driver and now team owner, Gerhard Berger (born 9/27/59).

This coming weekend sees the running of the SCCA Solo National Championships being held for the first time at Heartland Park in  Topeka, Kansas.

The annual event is the focus of the year for literally thousands of Autocross drivers across the country. Over the weekend the top 1,200 autocrossers will be competing for National Championship status in 72 different classes.

Happy Birthday to NASCAR driver Joe Nemechek (born 9/26/63)

According to a report by SPEED TV, ex-Formula 1 star and Indy 5000 winner, Juan Pablo Montoya, was very pleased by his first real stock car test at Talladega yesterday. The Columbian ran several laps in a Chip Ganassi racing ARCA spec stock car (above) in prepeartion for a full run at the Nextel Cup next season.

 “I came out of the pits, I went into Three and Four, started listing and said, ‘Ah, let’s just try it’ and I just went full throttle and went through it and went into One pretty fast. They told me [the track is] flat easy, so to try it. I just went for it. It went through it and it felt pretty quick, to be honest. The car really moves around a lot more from what I am used to, but after a while you just get the hang of it. It is a lot of fun, and a lot of technique. I think experience will help a lot in the car knowing when to run high and when to run low. I am getting there, but it is going to take a little bit of time.”

Montoya posted a fastest lap of 186.667mph, good enough for sixth-best among the 31-cars testing.