A week after the Indianapolis 500, the cultural dissonance of American open-wheel racing continued to play itself out as Champ Car raced at the Milwaukee Mile and the IRL was at Watkins Glen.
Champ Car struggled with too few cars and too little depth of field on a beautiful spring weekend in Wisconsin, while the IRL contended with similar problems amid a miserably rainy weekend in upstate New York. Put the two together and you might have a pretty compelling show but, left as they are, the product on both counts is dubiously second-rate.
At Milwaukee,
Sebastien Bourdais scored his fourth straight win, demonstrating that his mastery of Champ Car racing now embraces the fearsome one-mile ovals. Starting from the pole, Bourdais was the man to beat all day as he won convincingly despite losing a lap at one point because of a cut tyre.
At the Glen, Marco Andretti once again shocked his more experienced competitors by forcing some of the IRL regulars to face the fact that they’ve grown stale and slow as road racers. The kid put many of them to shame until he was knocked out of the race by one of the sport's most notoriously neurotic drivers who has an unfortunate history of colliding with three generations of Andrettis.
Looking, first of all, at Bourdais, it should now be clear to anyone with half a brain that he is one of the world's fastest, smartest drivers. In a proper world, we would have seen 'Seabass' battling to win at Indianapolis over the past four years as Newman/Haas showed the world they are every bit a match for Penske, Ganassi and Andretti-Green.
