With the success of the inaugural Edmonton event still reverberating throughout the Champ Car World Series paddock, the Grand Prix of San Jose is gearing up to make an equal splash as the turbocharged Champ Cars invade the streets of Silicon Valley this weekend.
The Taylor Woodrow Grand Prix of San Jose marks Champ Car's first visit to California's Bay Area and continues the series' legacy of holding three-day Festivals of Speed in the heart of some of the largest markets in the world. The eleven-turn temporary street course winds its way around the McEnery Convention Centre, with the start/finish line located on Almaden Boulevard.
As important as the inaugural San Jose event is to the future of Champ Car, of more immediate importance is the fact that the event signals the start of the second half of the Champ Car World Series season. With seven races already run, the only thing that can be predicted about the 2005 season is that
nothing can be predicted.
The first half of the year has seen five different winners in seven races, five different polesitters and 20 of the 24 drivers that have made starts have at least one top-ten finish to their credit.
Those successes are noteworthy, but they have not helped the field rein in the defending series champion as the man leading the championship at the halfway pole is the same guy that led everyone across the finish line in 2004. Sebastien Bourdais holds a 21-point lead heading into San Jose and rolls into California on the heels of an Edmonton victory that saw him come from tenth on the starting grid to score the win. Bourdais' ability to keep his car in one piece is one of the reasons for his success this year as he leads the series in laps and miles completed, and is the only driver to have finished every race so far this season.
His chief antagonist both on and off the track, Paul Tracy, sits just 21 points behind the front-running Frenchman. Tracy and Bourdais are the only drivers with multiple wins this year and are also the only drivers with multiple Bridgestone Pole Awards in 2005. Tracy has used strong qualifying runs to earn his points this year, qualifying in the top five in every race and starting in the top three in six of the seven starts. He has been on the podium in every race that he has finished this year, leading the series with five podium runs.
Podium finishes have suddenly become the forte of Spaniard Oriol Servia, who is on the finest roll of his six-year Champ Car career. Servia's second-place run in Edmonton gave him three consecutive podium finishes for the first time in his career, and boosted him into fourth place in the points, the highest he has ever been in his Champ Car career. He has four podium finishes in the five races that he has run with Newman Haas and is just 26 points out of second place in the standings.
Probably the only people that left Edmonton without a grin on their faces were those wearing the uniforms of RuSPORT, as a dominant on-track weekend went for naught after late-race incidents. But the final results were the only downside for the Colorado-based team all weekend as Justin Wilson and AJ Allmendinger were the stars of the show - until closing time. The team will be looking for a similar weekend with a revised ending in San Jose, building on one of the most successful outings of its two seasons in Champ Car.
Allmendinger scored the first pole of his series career by leading both Edmonton qualifying sessions, turned a fastest race lap that was more than a full second faster than anyone else's and led a race - and a career-high 40 laps. His team-mate was equally quick, starting on the outside of the front row and running up front all day, including a long stretch where he pressured race leader Tracy relentlessly in trying to wrest the lead from the former series champion. Wilson recovered from an ill-timed spin to earn his fifth top-five finish of the year and is within striking distance of Bourdais, sitting just 30 points behind at the halfway point.
