Bourdais suffered one of the worst starts of his entire career as he dropped from third to seventh in the early laps and spent the first fuel stint trapped behind Allmendinger's replacement in the RuSPORT squad, former series champ and defending Portland winner Cristiano da Matta.
Bourdais' ability to stretch his fuel mileage further than everyone else allowed him to take the lead briefly every time Allmendinger stopped and that, plus the combination of quick driving when most necessary and faultless pit work from his Newman-Haas team, allowed the current championship leader to bypass da Matta, his teammate Junqueira, a struggling Paul Tracy and a plucky Clarke.
Slotting into third place at the conclusion of the second pit cycle Bourdais still found himself half a minute adrift of Allmendinger, which triggered a sensational series of laps as the raced moved into its final quarter. Such was the Frenchman's pace at this point that he was able to carve 15 seconds out of Wilson and move onto the Englishman's tail in the final five laps and even though the possibility of a fifth straight victory was gone, Bourdais still kept the pressure on right until the end of a race in which he was never happy with the handling of his car.
Allmendinger was understandably cautious in the closing laps, perhaps reflecting on a nine day period that saw him sacked from the team he has driven for since he graduated out of karting, hired by the team that his karting mentor Paul Tracy drives for, propose (successfully) to his new fiancé ¡nd then finally achieve something that he threatened to do but was never able to complete for his former employers at RuSPORT. When the chequered flag flew the gap between he and Wilson was down to a shade over five seconds but everyone knew that it could have been a lot more.
Yet another second place for Wilson will surely have left him with mixed feelings although the fact that he outscored Bourdais for the first time this year will have given him some comfort.
