Paul Tracy in an Eventful Cleveland Race

CLEVELAND, Ohio – June 25, 2006 – On lap one PT found himself looking more like the jets and airplanes that frequent Cleveland's Burke Lakefront Airport than the Champ Cars there for the weekend. An incident with Sebastien Bourdais and Bruno Junquiera saw Paul's car launching high in the air and briefly riding on top of Bourdais car and seemingly Bourdais himself before crashing back to Earth flattening a rear tire and causing serious damage to the front of Paul' car. He immediately headed for the pits where repairs were made and amazingly he was able to return to the track and run as high as P4 with very competitive lap times. Then on lap 23 Nicky Pastorelli tried a banzai move to pass PT and nailed Paul's right rear tire sending him spinning and back to the pits once again. He still continued to run competitive lap times despite the two incidents and at this point an ill handling car. But on lap 43 the battles that his car had fought seemed to finally take their toll when Paul lost control and slammed into the concrete barrier at Turn 8 ending his day. PT finished the race in P16 while his now two week old teammate A.J. Allmendinger went on to win his second race in a row.

Paul: “I came out of Turn 1 and was racing the Newman-Haas cars down the back straight and I got squeezed in between them and the next thing I knew I was flying. The team did a great job repairing the damage but the car was very hard to drive afterwards. I hit the wall coming out of Turn 8 and it ended my day. I’m glad the weekend is over, I’m just going to forget about it and move on to Toronto, my home town, and chase my first Victory of the season.”