The Toronto leg of ChampCars swing through Canada proved to be a chaotic and incident packed race with only 8 cars left running at the end.  Team Australia’s Will Power emerged victorious through the crashes, rain and spins.

It all started on the opening lap with an incident invloving Paul Tracy, Tristan Gommendy, Jan Heylen and Katherine Legge. Oriol Servia looked set for a possible victory as he was leading Sebastian Bourdais and Justin Wilson until he started to run low on fuel.

In the rain Wilson slid into Ryan Dalziel, while last week’s winner, Robert Doornboss slid into the rear of championship rival Bourdais, taking him out.

The only finishers were:

1.  Will Power  (Team Australia)
2.  Neel Jani  (PKV)
3.  Justin Wilson (RSPORTS)
4.  Simon Pagenaud (Team Australia)
5.  Bruno Junqueira (Dale Coyne)
6.  Robert Doornbos (Minardi Team USA)
7.  Ryan Dalziel (Pacific Coast Motorsports)
8.  Alex Tagliani (RSPORTS)

Triple ChampCar Champion Sebastian Bourdais put the bad experiences of the last race in Las Vegas behind him and returned to his usual dominant form at the Long Beach Grand Prix, registering his third consecutive victory at the California street race. Bourdais was never really challenged from the flag, and only headed when other drivers pitted out of sequence.

The major news of the weekend involved Bourdais’ arch-rival Paul Tracy. Tracy suffered a compression fracture in the small of his back after hitting the wall in Saturday’s practice session. The Canadian will be out for at least three months. His place on the Forsythe team was taken by Oriel Servia, who mysteriously is without a full time ChampCar seat this season. Servia qualified sixteenth after just a few installation laps and then proceeded to drive a brilliant race pulling himself through the field to finish second.

First round winner Will Power finished thrird to consolidate his position at the top of the points table.

The Top 10 finishers were:

1. Bourdais (Newman/ Haas/ Lanigan Racing)
2. Servia (Forsythe Championship Racing)
3. Power (Team Australia)
4. Wilson (RSPORTS)
5. Tagliani (RSPORTS)
6. Junqueira (Dale Coyne Racing)
7. Jani (PKV Racing)
8. Rahal (Newman/ Haas/ Lanigan Racing)
9. Dalziel (Pacific Coast Motorsports)
10. Legge (Dale Coyne Racing)

The opening event of the 2007 ChampCar World Series in Las Vegas, was, in all honestly a farcical affair. With so many “firsts” something was bound to not work right and unfortunately is was the one thing that hadn’t been really tested – how well the new ChampCar would perform in a race. The strange thing is that it wasn’t the chassis that caused problems, but the refueling rigs for the cars. Some worked and some didn’t. As a result several drivers literally had dry pit stops and had to come back around for another go at getting fuel into the car. Paul Tracy and Bruno Junqueria were perhaps the two highest profile victims.

Others were expressing concern about the wear rate of the tires, yet all tire problems seemed to end up affecting just one car, that of three-time champion Sebastian Bourdais, who after three punctures ended his day parked at the side of the road after hitting a wall.

Other’s fell victim to spins (Dan Clarke), gearbox issues (Justin Wilson) and contact with the wall (Graham Rahl).

Through all this Team Australia’s Will Power drove a clean and mature race to score his first victory on what many have declared to be the best street circuit that ChampCar has yet raced on. Behind him five other cars were on the lead lap with only eight finishers overall.

The finishers were:

1. Will Power (Team Australia)
2. Robert Doornbos (Minardi Team USA)
3. Paul Tracy (Forsythe)
4. Alex Tagliani (RSPORTS)
5. Tristan Gommendy (PKV)
6. Katherine Legge (Dale Coyne)
7. Bruno Junqueira (Dale Coyne)
8. Alex Figge (Pacific Coast)

As we get closer to the start of the 2007 ChampCar season various driver and team line-ups are being confirmed. As expected second-generation American star Graham Rahal (below) has been confirmed as the second driver at the championship winning Newman-Haas team.

MinardiUSA have announced that their second driver will be “Speedy” Dan Clarke where the Englishman will join previously announced ex-F1 driver Robert Doornbos. Despite continuing to stress that they would only rin one car this year for Paul Tracy, the Forsythe team has announced that Mario Dominguez will return to the team in a second car for the 2007 season, just nine months after being effectively sacked by the team.

The RuSPORT and Rocketsports teams will combine this year to run as RSPORTS, effectively pairing Justin Wilson and Alex Tagliani.

Happy Birthday today to former F1 World Champion Jody Scheckter (born 1/29/50),

and to former Atlantics and new ChampCar driver Alex Figge (born 1/29/82)