Champ Car World Series points leader Sebastien Bourdais will be chasing history while the rest of the field chases him as the as the series heads to the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve for this weekend's Molson Indy Montreal.
Bourdais will be trying to join an elite club of drivers in Montreal as he looks to secure his fourth consecutive Champ Car victory – a streak that has been matched only eight times in the long history of Champ Car racing.
The Frenchman will be looking to join such fabled names as Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt and all three members of the championship-winning Unser family (Al Sr., Al Jr. and Bobby), as well as Alex Zanardi and Cristiano da Matta as the only drivers to string together at least four consecutive Champ Car wins.
A victory in Montreal – a track Bourdais has yet to finish better than 15th on – would do far more than put him in the record books however, as a fourth straight win would put him firmly in the driver's seat in his quest for a second straight Champ Car World Series title. Bourdais leads Paul Tracy by 53 points heading into the weekend, which is the tenth race on the 14-event schedule. The Newman Haas driver saw his series lead nearly double in Denver as his win was coupled with a Tracy crash that left him 16th in the final results. This will be the second time that Bourdais has tried for four consecutive wins, having won three straight last season before a fifth-place run in Vancouver ended the streak.
Tracy has had more luck than Bourdais at Montreal, having finished in the top six in each of his three previous Montreal starts, although he has yet to finish on the podium or lead a single lap at the 2.709-mile permanent road course. Tracy has used strong qualifying results to stay in contention this year, qualifying in the top five in each of the year's nine events, but his three DNFs have allowed Bourdais – who has completed all but one of the series laps this year – to build his advantage.
Based on prior history, Bourdais' teammate Oriol Servia may be the biggest threat to the points leader in Montreal. Servia finished second in the 2003 Montreal event after starting on the outside of the front row, and has finished in the top four in each of his last five races in 2005. His recent run has vaulted him into third in the series point standings where he stands just 66 points behind his team-mate. Only Bourdais has scored more points than Servia in the last five races, sparking his move up the points ladder.
Tracy's Forsythe Championship Racing teammate Mario Dominguez is making a second-half move that could equal Servia's charge, building a streak of three consecutive top-five runs. His run was capped in Denver with a second-place finish that earned him his first podium trip of the season and also boosted him into the top five in points for the first time since the season opener. Dominguez has a Montreal streak going as well, as a fifth-place finish in 2003 was followed by a third-place result last season.
Alex Tagliani returns to his home track as the Montreal-born driver looks to atone for a victory that got away in 2003. The Team Australia driver led a Montreal race-record 52 laps from pole in the '03 event and was the class of the field before fuel issues caused him to pit off sequence and eventually cost him the race. Tied for seventh in the title hunt, Tagliani has never started deeper than eighth in Montreal and has a victory to his credit, that coming in the 1999 Toyota Atlantic event.
The RuSPORT crew heads to Montreal looking to carry a bit of Denver momentum with it. AJ Allmendinger ended a tough run of form with a podium finish last time out, and visits a Montreal track where he qualified on the outside of the front row a year ago. He won from pole on the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Toyota Atlantic competition in 2003 and is looking to slip back into the top five after falling one point behind Dominguez in Denver.
