Different times, different cars, same battle of wills - Servia and Tracy have fought hard many times at Surfers, like here in 2002. (LAT photo) ยป More Photos
Santa Claus came down the chimney at 5350 West Lakeview Parkway, South Drive in Indianapolis (aka Champ Car headquarters) with some goodies over the holidays. First came news that Eric Bachelart inked a deal with the Australian-based Opes Prime financial group that will ensure his Conquest Racing fields two cars in the 2008 and '09 Champ Car World Series. Hardly had we recovered from our New Year's Eve revelries than we were greeted with the welcome announcement that Oriol Servia will drive for PKV Racing this year. Then, yesterday, we learned that Paul Tracy and Gerald Forsythe have kissed and made up, Ensuring the mercurial Canadian will continue to be the true "Face of Champ Car" in '08 and God willing and the creek don't rise through the end of the five-year deal the pair of them inked in early '06.
And did we mention Rocketsports which many (yours truly included) all but wrote off at the end of the last season is running classified advertisements to fill vacancies on its Champ Car team in the latest Autosport?
Pragmatists will note Servia's deal brings to one (1) the number of Champ Cars officially spoken for in '08, although one could arguably bump that number all the way up to three (3) given the Tracy/Forsythe rapproachment and the fact that it's as close to a sure thing as you'll find in racing that Alex Figge will return for a sophomore season at Pacific Coast Motorsports.
That's a far cry from virtually every other racing series presuming to call themselveS "major league," be it F1, Nex sorry Sprint Cup, Indy Racing League, ALMS, Grand-Am, Busch, DTM, MotoGP . . . you name it. And forgetting about the overall numbers for the moment, there are some crucial ingredients to the Champ Car soup circa '08 yet to be sorted out, e.g. whether Dan Pettit will dragoon Justin Wilson into driving for Forsythe/Pettit Racing or release him to Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing; whether that same NHLR will finalize a program for the series' Great American hope (aka Graham Rahal) and whether and/or where '07 Champ Car Atlantic champion Rafael Matos will land with his $2 million of in-kind support. Were Champ Car to lose Wilson and/or Rahal and/or Matos it would quickly negate any of the positive vibes created in recent weeks.
target="_new"> David Phillips follows Alex Zanardi's wheeltracks in his amazing New York Marathon run in our February issue, on sale now.
On the other hand, it's hardly unprecedented for a plethora of question marks to hang over the Champ Car World Series in the first full week of January. One need only harken back to this time last year when Forsythe was acting for all the world as if his team would only run one car, NHLR was two months away from formally announcing Rahal's spot on the team, Conquest's participation in the series was "iffy" and most of the other teams had one or more seats available to understand the present situation is akin to business as usual.
Then again, at this time last year the position of Steve Shunck, Champ Car public relations director, had just been "eliminated" and the Champ Car principal most keenly attuned to the series' public image Kevin Kalkhoven was off, in his words, "communing with penguins" in Antarctica. He subsequently stated he had learned a hard lesson about bad news and negativity rushing in to fill the void created by last winter's dearth of news and vowed not to make the same mistake twice.
Kalkhoven and partners Forsythe, Pettit and Paul Gentilozzi (along with Champ Car president Steve Johnson, executive vice president Tony Cotman and executive vp of communications David Higdon) are slated to meet later this week. One would like to think the rest learned the same lesson Kalkhoven took on board last year and that they will be suitably "pro-active" about generating and disseminating more good news in the coming weeks, for example announcing at least one driver/team signing a week between now and Spring Training, slated for Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on March 10-14. Of course, disseminating good news is easy enough . . . at least it should be. Generating good news? That's the hard part.
David Phillips is a Senior Writer for RACER magazine.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SpeedTV.com, FOX, NewsCorp, SPEED Channel, or Haymarket Worldwide.
