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Tracy will start from pole position again

4 min read

CLEVELAND (AP) – For the second straight year, Paul Tracy will start from the pole in the Champ Car Grand Prix of Cleveland. In this race, though, the inside of Row 1 isn’t always the place to be. With temperatures reaching the 90s, Tracy blazed around the course in 57.419 seconds Saturday to secure the pole and a chance to be the first car into the course’s infamous Turn 1 – a traditional spot for mishaps and chaos.

A year ago, Tracy started on the pole but got knocked out of the race after sustaining damage when he was hit from behind by Justin Wilson, who was pushed into Tracy when Alex Tagliani tried a daring inside pass.

Bang. Crash. Boom. Welcome to the wide-open Turn 1 at Burke Lakefront Airport.

“We’ve had races where we’ve gotten through there without a problem,” said Tracy, whose only victory came at Cleveland in 1993. “And we’ve had six, seven, eight and nine cars taken out at once. I guess we’ll see what happens.”

Tracy, who has won two poles this season and 24 in his career, will start alongside Cristiano da Matta (57.424), who won his first Champ Car race in three years last week at Portland, Ore.

Two-time defending champion Sebastien Bourdais (57.559) and rookie Andrew Ranger (57.801) will be in Row 2.

The series points leader, Bourdais had his fastest lap slowed by Tracy, who spun out and slowed the Frenchman.

“Paul is really selfish on the race track,” said Bourdais, who crashed into Tracy this season at Monterrey, Mexico. “He doesn’t care about what happens around him. There has been a lot of controversy with Paul with a lot of drivers.”

Because of Turn 1’s destructive past – four times in the last five years at least one car has been sent to the garage on Lap 1 – Champ Car officials have decided to place an orange barrel on the center yellow line in the front stretch for today’s 94-lap race.

The idea is to stop drivers from dipping inside to get through the turn first. They must stay to the left of the construction barrel and can’t stray over the line or incur a drive-through penalty – a slower second lap. Once the drivers pass Turn 1, the barrel will be put away.

“I hope nobody hits the barrel like a football and kicks it into somebody,” Tracy said. “Our goal is to try and get to the corner first and then try to be out of the corner first.”

On Saturday, the weekend’s first of two Toyota Atlantic Series races was run with the barrel sitting on the entrance to Turn 1. The trial run wasn’t encouraging – two cars were knocked out in a pileup that sent one car momentarily airborne.

At almost the exact moment, on the edge of the airport, a helicopter crashed on a runway because of an undetermined problem while landing. The pilot was not hurt and walked away, and there were no injuries on the ground.

This isn’t the first time race officials have tried to tame Turn 1. A few years back, orange traffic cones were placed there with the hope that they would funnel drivers through. Instead, all the cones produced was another wreck.

Bourdais was the beneficiary of last year’s Lap 1 crash as he slithered around danger and ran away from the field to win by more than 15 seconds.

“I probably wasn’t going to win the race, to be perfectly honest,” Bourdais said. “We didn’t have the strongest car out there. Sometimes, racing isn’t fair.”

Bourdais favors the barrel – an idea conceived by Tony Cotman, Champ’s vice president of operations – as long as it works. The spaciousness of the turn makes it too enticing for drivers trying to make up ground quickly.

“Somebody needed to narrow the track,” Bourdais said. “It’s so tempting that everyone is shooting for the apex, but obviously not everyone is going to make it.”

The qualifying session ended a few minutes early when A.J. Allmendinger spun at Turn 8 and slammed backward into a tire barrier. Allmendinger was taken to a hospital for precautionary tests. He’ll have to pass a reflex test today before he can compete.

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