MOTORSPORT: Aussies head for American titles

Will Power is in the box seat to take the IndyCar title, but he is still essentially a road racing specialist and his main rival goes well on ovals – and the finale is at California’s Fontana Speedway, a 2-mile (3.2km) oval.

Sir Jack Brabham’s teenage grandson Matthew is in line for the US F2000 Championship with big lead going into the final races at Virginia International Raceway.

In NASCAR the crews of Marcos Ambrose and his Richard Petty Motorsports teammate Aric Almirola have been swapped for the final 10 rounds of the Sprint Cup.

The Formula One community is mourning the death of its long-time and much-loved top medical man, Professor Sid Watkins, who played such a major hand in safety advances in the sport – especially after Ayrton Senna’s death in 1994.

Watkins’ death, at 84, coincided with a call by Mark Webber for the immediate safety focus in F1 to be on stopping cars getting airborne – as Frenchman Romain Grosjean’s Lotus-Renault did two weeks ago at the first corner of the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, flying close to Ferrari’s world championship leader Fernando Alonso’s head.

In rallying Chris Atkinson is having his second MINI drive at Rally Great Britain in Wales and it’s familiar territory for him.

Oval expertise the one cloud over Power
Toowoomba’s Will Power and American Ryan Hunter-Reay are to fight out the IndyCar championship in a 500-mile (800km) race that will start in daylight but finish at night under lights.

It is the seventh straight year that the IndyCar series battle has gone to the wire.

Tragically last year it ended with a 15-car pile-up on the Las Vegas oval track, two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon dead, and Scotsman Dario Franchitti taking the title ahead of Power for the second season.

Driving for Roger Penske, Power has a 17-point lead going into this weekend’s finale at Fontana Speedway aiming to clinch it at the third attempt.

There’s a US$1 million bonus for the champion, but it’s the title more than the money that Power wants and needs.

While the Aussie has won the Mario Andretti Trophy two years in a row as IndyCar’s best road racer, his best finish in four oval races this season has been eighth – in Texas in June. His other finishes on ovals this season have been 28th at the Indy 500, 12th at Milwaukee and 23rd in Iowa.

In what has been a distinguished American career over several years now, Power’s sole oval victory came in the second leg of a double-header in Texas last year. Hunter-Reay’s best finishes in the IndyCar series have been seventh the past two seasons but he has made huge progress this season with

Andretti Autosport. He won the most recent race two weeks ago on the streets of Baltimore and has had four oval wins in his career – two of them this year, at Iowa and Milwaukee.

Hunter-Reay hit a wall in testing at Fontana midweek and the engine change that has been made in his repaired car will cost him a starting grid penalty, but he claims to be thriving on having to chase and overhaul Power for the title.

Other mathematical contenders for the title are Power’s Brazilian teammate Helio Castroneves and New Zealander Scott Dixon, driving for Ghip Ganassi’s Honda-powered team (while Penske and Andretti use Chevrolet engines), but they are long shots - 52 and 53 points off the lead respectively.

Power has said his approach at Fontana will be the same as every race weekend.

“You go into the race to win it. At the end of the day it’s always about making the most out of every situation. That’s going to be the case this weekend as well,” he said.

“It’s going to be obviously a tough race. We just focus on the job that we have to do to execute on the day. The rest will work itself out. Either we’ll be champion or we won’t.”

Hunter-Reay, who was being mentioned as a possible replacement for Penske’s other Australian IndyCar driver Ryan Briscoe next year but now seems likely to remain with the Andretti team, said his plan for Fontana was “pretty straightforward”.

“We have to win to get ourselves there [the title],” he said.

Power has crashed in the final round the past two seasons but said of Fontana

“Maybe it will be the first last race that I finish, because every year I get crashed out. So I’m determined this time to just finish the last race and finish it as the leader of the championship.”

Options for Brabham both sides of Atlantic
Matthew Brabham has won four races in the US F2000 Championship in his debut season in America, driving for Cape Motorsports with Wayne Taylor Racing, with the last two races to be run at Virginia this weekend.

The son of Sir Jack's son, Geoff (who had a long and successful career in the States), Matthew is among eight drivers vying for three Team USA Scholarships, for which the prizes are fully-funded drives in Britain in coming months.

Two of the prizewinners will race in the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch and the Walter Hayes Trophy at Silverstone, while one will contest the final rounds of the British Formula Renault Championship at Silverstone.

Brabham’s instant success overseas give him options to pursue either his main ambition, to follow in his grandfather Sir Jack and uncle David’s Formula One tracks, or to make his career in America.

Ambrose’s new crew chief in the RPM swap is Mike Ford, who has had 25 Cup race wins and got drivers to The Chase – the “playoffs” for the top dozen drivers in the series over the final 10 rounds – six times. Ford almost won the Cup title with Denny Hamlin at Joe Gibbs Racing two years ago.

The RPM swap, which also involved all other crew members on the team’s two Ford Fusions, takes effect from this weekend’s 27th race of the Sprint Cup season at Chicagoland Speedway.

Ambrose has had two wins – both on the Watkins Glen road course – in his 145-race Sprint Cup career and is now up to 15th in this season’s standings, while less experienced Almirola is 22nd.

Ford said of joining Ambrose: “Our goal is to take my experience and make sure we can consistently run up front and win races.”

“The FIA [Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, world governing body of motorsport] has been doing some research on driver head protection and at the moment it looks like some form of forward protection, probably a kind of roll-bar, is going to be introduced in the not-too-distant future,” Webber said in his latest column on the BBC’s website.

“We have to get this [next safety] decision right. It's a big step for the sport… The tricky thing is to decide what exactly you are protecting against… The Grosjean incident [in Belgium], and a similar one involving David Coulthard and Alexander Wurz in Australia in 2007, happened because of cars climbing over each other and being launched into the air… That also happened to me when I flipped in Valencia (Spain) in 2010.

“So should you shut off that option somehow by enclosing the wheels but leave the cockpit open? Or leave the wheels open and create more cockpit protection?

“I feel stopping cars launching is a bigger priority, if only because I think that happens more often. Cockpit intrusion is rarer, but it still has to be taken seriously… In both cases, we have been lucky and we all know that luck will run out one day", Webber stated.

It is being run in Wales two months earlier than normal, so the conditions are likely to be much better than the snow, ice, fog and freezing temperatures usually encountered in November, although there is still the prospect of rain.

Although Ford’s Finn Jari-Matti Latvala has hopes of repeating last year’s Rally GB victory, and his Norweigian teammate this season Petter Solberg is even more confident, Citroen’s French superstar Sebastien Loeb is cruising towards his ninth straight world title.

And Citroen will clinch its eighth manufacturers’ crown this weekend if it scores six points more than Ford.

Australian Chris Atkinson is confident too as he goes into his second event with the Italian-run Portuguese MINI team after fifth on his first outing in Germany.

“If the stages now [in September rather than November] are not wet it's a bit like tarmac, the ground is very hard, compact and it can be very hard on tyres,” Atkinson said.

“I feel quite confident after recce - gravel is for sure a more familiar surface for me and I know most of the stages here at Rally GB. There are only three stages I’ve never driven but they’re run in similar areas to others that I know.

“The first very stage of the rally, Dynant, is completely new but it feels like a very nice one where you have to be quite committed and even take a few risks to make a good time. Not an easy stage to start with and it was also wet and slippery when we recce’d it.

“I won't push 100 per cent from the beginning though. I'll see how the feeling is and work from there,” Aktison said.

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