Preview: Milwaukee.

The Champ Car World Series has witnessed many a change at the venerable Milwaukee Mile ever since the chequered flag first flew there over Wilbur Shaw's victory in 1933 and the 2005 event witnesses yet another as the circuit's two-year love-affair with night racing comes to an end.

The Time Warner Cable Road Runner 225 Presented by U.S. Bank will move to a Saturday afternoon slot in 2005 after the stoic Milwaukee fans spent two Saturday evenings freezing their wotsits off in 2003 and 2004 in an experiment that certainly made the one-mile oval look different, but didn't have the NASCAR night-racing effect the series had hoped for.

Now that the costly lighting system has been put aside, Milwaukee can get down to what it does best once more, providing close, hard fought traditional short track action.

This year's event will be the first time since 1997 that the driver leading the points standings will miss a race, meaning that a new name will be atop the Championship when the chequered flag falls on Saturday.

Bruno Junqueira took the points lead with a win in Monterrey, but was injured in Sunday's Indianapolis 500, suffering a spinal injury in an accident with AJ Foyt IV. Junqueira had spinal surgery at Indianapolis' Methodist Hospital and will remain there until the end of the week. Oriol Servia, a friend and training partner of Junqueira, will fill the Brazilian driver's berth at Newman-Haas Racing for at least the Milwaukee event.

Any time you talk about Champ Car racing at Milwaukee, the name Paul Tracy springs to mind as one of the most successful drivers ever to take to the West Allis oval. Tracy didn't take long to adjust to the Mile as he led 55 laps in his very first trip. He would go on to lead at least 22 times around the Mile in each of his first seven years, starting a career that now sees three wins on his Milwaukee resume with 531 laps led. Tracy enters the weekend in the fourth spot in the point standings and looks to rebound after contact in Monterrey left him with a 15th-place finish.

The man Tracy had contact with in Monterrey will head to Milwaukee with hopes of finally solving the Mile as defending series champion Sebastien Bourdais chases his first Wisconsin podium. The Frenchman is yet to have sort of luck on the West Allis oval, with finishes of 18th and ninth to his credit in his first two stops. Bourdais qualified on the outside of the front row in Milwaukee last season but crashed on lap 50 and finished shotgun on the field.

Bourdais will need to come up with some sort of solution over the weekend if he is to hold the rampaging Justin Wilson at bay and out of the series lead. Wilson has matched Champ Car career highs with fourth-place finishes in each of the first two stops on the 2005 schedule and is currently third in the points, just 11 markers behind Bourdais and 12 in back of Junqueira. Wilson made his oval-track debut in Milwaukee last year, starting 12th and finishing 11th.

The only other driver in this weekend's field with a Milwaukee victory on his resume will achieve another in a long list of major career milestones when the green flag flies on Saturday. Jimmy Vasser, who came from fifth on the grid in 1998 to earn a place in Victory Lane, will extend his Champ Car-record streak of consecutive starts to 200 in Milwaukee. The veteran took possession of the series record for consecutive starts last season eclipsing the old mark of 192 held by Al Unser Jr., and continues to push the mark to new heights.

Andrew Ranger announced his presence with authority in Montreal as the 18-year-old Canadian earned a podium finish in just his second career Champ Car start. In doing so, Ranger became the youngest driver to ever ascend a Champ Car podium, but more importantly, he leapfrogged into fifth place in the series standings. He is the first driver in 12 seasons to score a podium finish in one of his first two starts, and comes to a Milwaukee track that saw him finish on the rostrum one year ago when he was competing in the Toyota Atlantic Championship.

The venerable Mile also holds special meaning to reigning Roshfrans Rookie of the Year A.J. Allmendinger, as the young Californian rolled to his first Champ Car top-five finish there one season ago. Duplicating or improving on that finish from 2004 would help the sophomore break out of a logjam of drivers in the mid pack of the standings as Allmendinger is part of a group of 10 drivers that are separated by just 10 points ranging from fifth to 14th in the championship chase.

Mario Dominguez comes off a pair of eighth-place finishes in his last two Milwaukee visits, and will look to duplicate his impressive Long Beach run as he fights for his first series championship. The Mexican driver earned a top-five finish in Long Beach in his first weekend with the Forsythe Championship Racing squad, and will be battling to break the tie for seventh in the standings that includes Cristiano da Matta and Timo Glock.

Da Matta is also chasing his first bit of Milwaukee success after four previous starts have left him continuing the hung for his first top-10. He best qualifying effort came in 2001 when he gridded third, but a first-lap crash sent him home in 25th.

Glock meanwhile will be looking to avoid the fate that befell him during pre-race testing in the weeks following the season-opener in Long Beach when the young German rookie planted his Rocketsports Racing Lola into the outside wall and was taken to hospital.

Alex Tagliani enters the weekend in the sixth spot in the title hunt, one point ahead of the aforementioned seventh-place tug-of-war, and one point behind the rookie Ranger. The Canadian veteran has five Milwaukee starts under his belt, one of those coming from the pole in 2003. He has led in two of his five West Allis starts and has shown that he can pick his way through the field there, gaining 13 spots to finish 12th in 2001.

Hoping to take the best opportunity of his Champ Car career to date with both hands, Servia comes off a top-10 run in Monterrey and will hope to reprise his 2003 Milwaukee success when the emerald banner flies on Saturday. Servia earned his first-ever Champ Car runner-up finish in Milwaukee in the '03 event, climbing from seventh on the starting grid to finish in the second spot. He followed that up with another strong run in last year's event, marching from his 11th-place starting spot to finish seventh.

HVM Inc. teammates Bjorn Wirdheim and Ronnie Bremer come to Milwaukee on vastly different momentum swings, but each are expecting to build on the promise shown during the two days of Mile testing in May. Wirdheim comes off a Monterrey event where he led 18 laps and finished a career-best eighth while Bremer came back to Earth after a strong Long Beach start. Bremer, who finished second in last year's Atlantic race at Milwaukee, was the first man out in Monterrey as a mechanical issue felled his car after just 13 orbits.