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About 3 on the Excitement Meter
When the pole-sitter leads almost the entire race and pulls off a win, you have to think, though, what happened resembles a parade more closely than a race. The CART gang got underway with a clear start under clear skies at Long Beach for the second race of the season. Helio Castroneves and Kenny Brack led the group off the starting grid, with Alex Tagliani getting the worst of the start when his left rear was clipped by an errant front wing. Next on the casualty list was Michael Andretti, who parked his Team Green Honda with electrical problems. For my money, the stars of the show were Paul Tracy, the one guy willing to edge toward those forbidding concrete barriers and attempt a pass, and Jimmy Vasser, who started the race trailing blue smoke from an over-filled oil reservoir, but then pulled off a third place finish. But that's the story, more or less. It was, as noted, a parade, especially after Kenny Brack's Ford/Lola snapped a gearbox, and he dropped his chase of the pole-sitter. One bright note, in my opinion, was another excellent run -- to a second-place finish -- by the new Newman-Haas driver, Cristiano da Matta. The champ -- Gil de Ferran -- drove a workman-like race to finish third to this teammate, Castroneves. Target-Chip Gannassi Racing's two rookies, Nicolas Minassian and Bruno Junqueira, started well back in the field but drove relatively good racings to finish 8th and 9th. Junqueira turned the fastest competition laps of the day, in fact. Reports from the TrenchesCastroneves holds off da Matta to win at The Beach LONG BEACH SUNDAY NOTEBOOK Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Parading Through The Streets of Long Beach in CART Auto Racing is owned by . Permission to republish Parading Through The Streets of Long Beach in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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