Q&A: Paul Tracy, Bruno Junqueira - Pt.1.

With two rounds of the CART Champ Car World Series to run, Paul Tracy and Bruno Junqueira continue to head the chase for the 2003 Vanderbilt Cup, bringing the season to a tense conclusion.

MC:
We have two races to go this season - the Lexmark Indy 300 in Surfers Paradise, which comes up in two weeks, followed by the King Taco 500 at California Speedway. Then we will have crowned a champion, and it very well could come from one of the two gentlemen joining us on the call today.

First up is the driver of the #3 Lola Ford-Cosworth for Team Players, our points leader right now with 226 points, Paul Tracy. Paul, thanks for joining us today.

Paul Tracy:
Thank you.

MC:
And we are also joined by his closest pursuer, Bruno Junqueira, driver of the #1 PacifiCare Lola-Ford-Cosworth for Newman-Haas Racing. Thank you for joining us today.

Bruno Junqueira:
Thank you.

MC:
We'll start with Paul. Obviously, it was a big weekend for you last week in Mexico City, and a huge crowd came to see it - 221,000 people on race day. You picked up your seventh win of the year, led 64 laps and had one of the better days in the season at a time you needed to put one up on the board. How satisfying was that event for you?

PT:
For our team, it was very satisfying. For us, the last four or five races have been a bit of a struggle. Qualifying has not gone very well, and race performance maybe was good, but not as good as we would have liked. Both Bruno and his team, they were starting to gain a lot of momentum in the championship and, for us, it was important to kind of pull the momentum back our way. So, to qualify on the pole the first day, and then start from the pole and win the race, was exactly what we needed to do, and what our hopes were to try to do, and we were able to achieve it.

MC:
You have a 29-point lead going into the final two races, but I've got to imagine that there's a bit of urgency to maybe wrap this thing up in Surfers Paradise. You get a 500-mile race on the California Speedway oval after that, and as we've seen many times, anything can happen - and usually does - at that place. How important is it for you to put the wrap up this thing in Australia?

PT:
I think it's something that we can't focus on because, for me, the last couple of races, I maybe was concentrating too much on just trying thinking about points, thinking about the championship. Those races did not go very well for me and, really, this last weekend, I just started focusing on what I had to do every practice session, to drive the best to my ability, and get the most out of the car, get the most out of the team. And that's what we're going to focus on when we go to Australia, just concentrate on every practice session and not worry about points, just do our best and, if we're able to wrap it up, that's half the battle. If not, we keep racing until the last lap in California.

MC:
Bruno, you had a strong race car in Mexico City and had a chance to stay up front, unfortunately what a lot of people didn't know at the time was that you had been struck ill and definitely were not feeling very good. How tough was it to drive a 750-horsepower race car feeling as poorly as you did that day?

BJ:
Well, it was very difficult, I was feeling really sick, but, fortunately, the race was going good and I felt we could finish second. The second pit-stop, we'll have to see, but I think we lost a bit of power at the end of the race. People started to pass me very easily on the straightaway. And, even if I was fast enough to keep the second position, I couldn't get back. And every time that I try to pass someone, someone would go and pass me by, and to end up finishing seventh was a bit frustrating and makes thing more difficult to win the championship. I will try to the last race to win this championship though.

MC:
You definitely have a shot at winning this thing heading down to Surfers Paradise, a street track, but a different kind of street track, and a pretty quick layout. What are your impressions of Surfers, and do you enjoy going there to race?

BJ:
Yeah, I like Surfers a lot. Last year, I was on the pole Friday and I lost the pole to Cristiano [da Matta] by a thousandth of a second. Unfortunately, in the race last year, it was raining very hard, I was leading and they decided to call a yellow flag - and then I finished 14th. I hope, this year, the weather will co-operate and we can go racing - and I hope that we have a good race there.

Q:
Paul, this race of course is taking place about as far away from Toronto, and maybe from the media glare on you here in Toronto. Does that take some of the pressure away and, now that Jacques Villeneuve has departed from the F1 scene, you are Canada's pre-eminent race car driver, does that also now put some pressure on you?

PT:
For me, Jacques is doing something totally different than what I've been doing for the last six, seven years. So the impact of what has happened in his career really doesn't affect me at all. To answer your first question, when you're in a championship, it doesn't really come into your mind where the race is, or what's going on. And, when it comes down to a situation like this, where you're battling for the championship, there's no less pressure anywhere. The pressure is very high and the competition level now is getting much tighter than it was at the beginning of the season, when there were a lot of the new teams, the drivers were figuring out how to do this and you're seeing a lot of different people on the grid up front now. So it's getting harder and harder to win now at the end of the year, and so really the pressure is at a maximum level right now.

Q:
It's got to be tough when you have a pretty nice lead with two races to go, because now you have to drive for points and that's so against your style. Just talk about your mindset for the last two races...

PT:
I think my mindset really is going to be the same as what it was for Mexico. Like I said at the beginning, I think the last couple of races I started thinking about the points too much and driving by the point number of my position. You know, I just went back to how I started at the start of the season and just said to myself 'this is an important race'. I treat every race like it's the last race in the championship right now, and I have to finish and I have to score as many points as I can. And that's how I'm going to go into Australia, just go with everything that I can to have a good result.

Q:
Bruno, I watched the [Mexico] race and it looked like Sebastien [Bourdais]' guys might have short-fuelled him and that's how you lost your spot going out. Can you talk about how your team-mate is supposed to be helping you?

BJ:
Yeah, that didn't help me much, but we still had a problem on the second pit-stop, which was five seconds longer. I had a three-second lead on Sebastien - even if he short-fuelled, he could have never have passed me - but, because I had the five-second longer pit-stop, and he did short fuel, he was able to pass me.

I was talking to my engineer before, and we are going to have to figure out what's happened, because we lost so much straightline speed by the end of the race, and this is why people passed me. Even if I was really fast on the chicane, on the rest of the track, I could not pass anybody and everybody passed me easily. We have to figure out what happened at the end, if something happened on the car.

Q:
Paul, you could perhaps become the first Canadian CART champion since Jacques Villeneuve - how important is it to you as a Canadian to be the first one in a number of years to achieve that?

PT:
I think, for me, I don't think of it as being Canadian or being this or being that. It's just a goal that I've had since I was a kid, since I started racing, to be a champion. All of my individual goals I think I've set have been about that. I've won a lot of races - 26 races now - and all of the individual goals that I've set for myself, I feel that I've achieved - but that doesn't mean as much as a championship and, until I achieve that, that's what I'm striving for.

Q:
And did you have a sense of that going into this season? There were some changes for you in the off-season coming into the season, did you have a sense that this could be the year for you?

PT:
I felt I had a good chance for sure, but I didn't think I would start as strongly as I did. When we started with the new team, I felt it would take us some time to learn and adjust to each other and, maybe by mid-season, I would be winning races. My off-season didn't go as well as I would have liked, and I wasn't very fast in testing and spring training. So, really, I didn't expect to come to the first three races and win three in a row, but it happened that way and everybody on the team got confidence in themselves and I was confident, and then it just all started to go up from there.

Q:
You have three top-ten finishes in Australia, including the one win you have there. Do you feel that your experience at Surfer's is going to be a big advantage over Bruno going into this race?

PT:
I don't know if it's a big advantage. Obviously Bruno started on the front row last year and he knows how to get around there. For me, I've always been very quick there, and I've won the race. But Surfer's is a very tricky track. I mean, they have never had a repeat winner there. When it's 15 years that you've never had a repeat winner, it shows you how demanding it can be and how easy it is to make a mistake. The goal for us is just to go down there and do everything we can to have a good result.

Q:
Will you be bringing the same car you had in Mexico?

PT:
Yeah, same car.