The all new Champ Car Atlantic challenger has made its long awaited debut after being unveiled at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
Swift Engineering have designed and produced the new 016.a chassis, Cosworth have fine-tuned the four-cylinder, 2.3-litre engine that will produce 300 horsepower on the new Atlantic cars while Yokohama has continued to develop the ADVAN racing tyres that the grid of 40 will run on over the course of the season.
With that bumper grid including a number of new teams and new drivers, Champ Car World Series co-owner Kevin Kalkhoven was in little doubt about the importance of the new Atlantic package for 2006.
“This evening's unveiling and series announcements mark the rebirth of open-wheel racing,” he said. “The Champ Car Atlantic Championship will introduce the series' drivers, teams and sponsors to the highest level of competition and clearly shows the considerable excitement that exists for the sport in North America.”
Manager director of the Atlantic series Vicki O'Connor was also pleased with the unveiling of the new car.
“We're so proud of the effort that it took by everyone involved to produce such a beautiful and powerful new Atlantic race car,” she said. “We can all take pride in the hard work it took to get to this point. We want to thank everyone at Swift, Cosworth, Yokohama, Champ Car and all the other manufacturers and sponsors for helping to create the new Atlantic. I think we're all excited to witness the debut of the new car and we can't wait to see what it's capable of on the track this season.”
With such a large amount of interest in the series for 2006, the pressure has been firmly on employees at Swift, who have been working round the clock to build the race cars for the coming season ready for delivery to the competitors on 8 March.
