LONG BEACH ---- Perhaps having a Monster on board can keep Paul Tracy from having a monstrous start again at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.

Tracy will again be one of the favorites this weekend when the Champ Car World Series comes to this seaside city for the 33rd running of the Grand Prix. Sunday's event caps three days of racing on the streets of Long Beach.

Tracy and many of the other drivers were already on site Wednesday, just three days after the Champ Car World Series dropped the green flag on the 2007 season in Las Vegas. Tracy was wearing a Monster cap, displaying his new connection with the fast-growing energy drink.

"It's our new sponsor, and we just signed a deal last week," said Tracy, a native Canadian who races out of Las Vegas. "Monster is locally based in Corona, so it's important that we do well here."

Tracy, 38, knows all about doing well at Long Beach. He has triumphed four times on the same course where he scored his first-ever Champ Car win in 1993, back when the series ran under the CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) handle.

"Obviously, I've got a lot of experience here on this track," Tracy said. "Some of it has been up and down, but I have won here four times, so we feel pretty good about our chances."

Tracy's hopes were wiped out early in last year's Long Beach race, as he got caught up in a multi-car crash on the first turn immediately after the start of the race. That pileup opened the door for Frenchman Sebastien Bourdais to repeat as Long Beach champion.

While Bourdais went on to claim his third straight series championship, Tracy finished a disappointing seventh in the final series points standings. But Tracy was happy with his third-place finish at the Vegas Grand Prix.

"We had a good first race," Tracy said. "We had a small problem in the pits, but I'm really happy with how the car ran."

Tracy started alongside pole-sitter Will Power in Las Vegas, but Tracy's first pit stop was nearly a waste of time, as he had to come back in after just four laps to refuel. Power went on to become the first Australian driver to win a race at the Champ Car or CART level.

"If you want to win championships at this level, you have to get the pit stops right," Tracy said.

Nearly 180,000 spectators are expected to attend the three days of racing, which includes the popular Toyota Pro/Celebrity Race and American Le Mans Series race on Saturday, as well as the EZ Lube Team Drift Challenge, a new form of motorsports which will be held all three days.

"We're going to have a smorgasbord of activities," said Jim Michaelian, the CEO for the Grand Prix Association of Long Beach. "We're going to have six races over three days, and we couldn't fit one more in if we tried."

Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster even got in on some Formula Drift action during demonstrations last week.

"For those old enough to remember, that was like an 'E' ticket ride at Disneyland," Foster said of his sliding experience though his city's streets.

The 11-turn Long Beach circuit, now in its sixth reconfiguration, will start and finish on Shoreline Drive and wind its way 1.97 miles around the Long Beach Convention Center and the Aquarium of the Pacific. The present course has been in place since 2000.

Toyota has been a major part of the Grand Prix of Long Beach since providing the pace car for the inaugural event in 1975. That first race was a Formula 5000 event, and the prestigious Formula One series added Long Beach to its schedule the following year. CART took over the race in 1984.

Long Beach is home to the first Toyota manufacturing plant in America.

"Toyota is the very essence of what a sponsor should be," said Michaelian. "We're delighted to maintain a relationship with them, as Toyota has been very instrumental in what we like to call America's premier road race."