"It Never Rains in California"

"It Never Rains In California"

• But it does rain in England. Often. And it makes for a high water table. Which seeps up through newly laid asphalt. And that meant the CART teams, fresh from a tough time in Germany, couldn't practice. And that meant the teams went racing with minimal track time.
• Those circumstances meant that the lucky teams hit the set-up dead on, and the unlucky ones spent the race getting out of the faster cars' way.
• Unluckiest of all seemed to be Team Target Chip Ganassi racing, with Junquiera going out early and Gidley driving to a prosiac 18th place finish while trying to avoid being run down from behind.
• Others hit the mark, particularly the Team Penske, Team Green and Team Rahal.
• Any fan will have to give two thumbs up to the dramatic battle between de Ferran and Brack for the win. In spite of all the downers that led up to that shoot-out, the wheel-to-wheel duel gave millions of new fans a taste of that which is best in the series.
• It's sad that CART got caught up in troubles of its own making and tragedies great and small during its European sojourn. The races in Germany and England were excellent, save for the rotten English weather and, worse, the terrible crash that cost popular driver Alex Zanardi his legs.
• A few drivers complained about the track, but most seemed happy to put on a good show for a group of potential fans.
• Thirty-eight thousand stuck out the rain delays and track drying enterprises to watch cars run faster than the vaunted F-1 rockets.
• And if they didn't come to their collective feet during the last few laps, they're not true racing fans. Brack and de Ferran ran wheel-to-wheel and diced through the lapped traffic, showing the fans more competition in 5 laps than they'd see in an entire F-1 race.
• Strategy got tossed out the window as CART officials were forced to shorten the race because of impending darkness.
• You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief as the CART gang finished its European tour and packed up for a two-week rest before racing again in Texas. The tour, too late in the summer not to escape being caught up in changeable weather conditions, began under a cloud of of distraught emotions following the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks and lost any element of good feeling with the injury to Zanardi.
The copyright of the article "It Never Rains in California" in CART Auto Racing is owned by Gary Presley. Permission to republish "It Never Rains in California" in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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