On the right track - Denver.

Bruno Junqueira returns to The Mile High City as the defending race winner of the Centrix Financial Grand Prix of Denver. The Brazilian drove wire-to-wire to claim his third career victory in last year's inaugural event on the 1.647-mile temporary street circuit.

Team owner/driver Adrian Fernandez started on the outside of row one in last year's Grand Prix of Denver and managed to hold onto a fourth place finish in the shadow of the Rockies.

Junqueira and Fernandez aside, the rest of the top seven finishers from CART's first trip to Denver in more than a decade are racing in either Formula One (Cristiano da Matta), NASCAR (Christian Fittipaldi) and the IRL (Tony Kanaan and Scott Dixon).

Paul Tracy (8th in 2002), Michel Jourdain Jr (9th in 2002) and Jimmy Vasser (10th) will all be looking to improve their results while for the nine series rookies on the entry list, this round will be one where they are truly stepping into the unknown.

The fact that most, if not all, of the series rookies will be seeing the Denver track for the first time on the eve of first practice doesn't mean that the veterans have the upper hand.

Around the streets of St Petersburg Sebastien Bourdais stunned everyone with a dominant performance in qualifying derailed only by inexperience in the race while both Darren Manning and Mika Salo are regarded as street circuit experts, both scoring good results around the streets of Monaco in F3000 and F1 respectively.