MOTORSPORT: Power switched on - and a hot Pye

The year for an Aussie to win the Indy 500?
For so long now Mark Webber has been the major focus overseas of Australian motorsport fans. To a lesser extent Marcos Ambrose, Ryan Briscoe and the rise of Daniel Ricciardo to reserve driver for Red Bull Racing.

But the man of the moment is Will Power -- and there's a newcomer to watch, 20-year-old Scott Pye, who won two of the three races at the first round of this year's British Formula Ford Championship.

Power's been around a fair while -- he was runner-up to Will Davison in the 2001 Australian Formula Ford Championship. He went to Europe, earned a lot of respect but wound up in America's Champ Car series, in which he shone.

Power won the very last Champ Car race at Long Beach, California, two years ago.

Last year, as a part-time driver for Team Penske in the Indy Racing League, having originally been brought in to substitute for Helio Castroneves during the Brazilian's big tax case, he won an IRL race at Edmonton, Canada, in July, then in August had his back broken in a terrible crash at Sonoma, California.

Roger "The Captain" Penske kept faith in Power throughout his rehabilitation and gave him a full-time drive this season -- as the team's No. 3 man alongside Castroneves, winner of three Indianapolis 500s, and Briscoe, who came close to winning the IRL title last year.

Approaching 30 now, Power has won the first two rounds of this year's Indy series on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and St Petersburgh, Florida. He goes to the Barber Motorsports Park road course in Birmingham, Alabama, this weekend as the 2-1 favourite -- on the Las Vegas Hilton Superbook -- for round three.

Power is so far in front, 44 points, that nobody can take his series lead in a single race.

Briscoe and Castroneves are at 5-1 this weekend, and Chip Ganassi pair Scott Dixon and Dario Franchitti 9-2.

After Alabama the series goes to Long Beach then Kansas before the Indy 500 -- the jewel in the crown of American open-wheeler racing.

Power is a big chance to become the first Australian to win the "Greatest Spectacle in Racing" on May 30. Briscoe too in that mighty Team Penske.

Also in the US this weekend, NASCAR is at the relatively flat one-mile (1.6km) Phoenix International Raceway oval for the seventh round of the Sprint Cup.

Marcos Ambrose has been in the top 20 in each of his three previous starts at Phoenix, but -- after his excellent first full-time Cup season last year - he hasn't finished in the top 10 in the Cup yet this year.

Hendrick Motorsports drivers have dominated at Phoenix in recent years -- they've won the past six races -- so count on Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin - and perhaps even Dale Earnhardt Junior -- being in the hunt there Sunday morning, Australian time.

Flying start for Aussie in British Formula Ford
Now to Scott Pye ... and what a start he's had in the British Formula Ford Championship.

Pole position for each of the three races at Oulton Park in Cheshire, victory in two of those races (eliminated from the other by his spinning teammate, Josh Hill, son of 1996 Formula One world champion Damon Hill), two fastest laps -- and a lap record.

Pye was on the Australian scene for some time and has had backing from the Australian Motor Sport Foundation.

He was third last year in the Australian Formula Ford Championship driving a locally-built Spectrum car, behind Nick Percat and New Zealand teenager Mitch Evans in French-built Mygale cars.

Pye also was second last year in NZ's Toyota Racing Series and was the rookie of the year in that championship. In Britain he's joined Jamun Racing, which has won the Formula Ford series there the past five years.

Jamun grew out of the team with which reigning F1 world champion Jenson Button won the British Formula Ford Championship in 1998 -- and it runs Mygales.

It's also the team with which another young Australian, Tim Blanchard, was second in the British Formula Ford Championship two years ago. Unfortunately Blanchard did not have the backing to stay in Europe, sat out last year, and now is in the V8 Supercar development series.

It's a great pity an obvious talent in open-wheelers didn't get to go further down that path.

We touched here late last July on the success of a couple of little-known Aussies abroad, Daniel Erickson and James Kovacic.

It's often hard to know whether a race win overseas will turn out to be a one-off or lead to more, perhaps many more -- and just what the standard of competition is in some international championships.

Incidentally, Kovacic -- from NSW's Central Coast and still only 16 -- is lining up for the Star Mazda series in the US this year with Australian Motor Sport Foundation support.

Erickson, 22, from Sydney, had his sights on Star Mazda too, but it wasn't to be. However, he is in America this weekend contesting the opening races in the F2000 Championship at Virginia International Raceway and is eyeing the Indy Lights series.

The British Formula Ford Championship is long-established and renowned for attracting much of the best young talent from around the world.

Its first champion, in 1968, was Australian Tim Schenken - who went on to F1 and is the only Australian other than world champions Sir Jack Brabham and Alan Jones, and two-time GP winner Mark Webber, to have scored world championship points -- including one podium.

James Courtney was Australia's last British Formula Ford champion in 2000.

Pye is in a great series with a terrific team. Apart from the Australian Motor Sport Foundation, he's got support from Triple Eight Race Engineering V8 Supercar super team principal Roland Dane.

"I wanted to back someone who is ambitious enough to take the step to go and race overseas," Dane said. "Scott is very determined as well as very talented.

"I sense a real determination in him to reach the top -- and, for me, that's what differentiates him from his peers."

Dane says Pye is wise to be solely focused on single-seaters for now, but that -- in time - he would welcome back in Australia for a career in V8 Supercars if his F1 dream does not eventuate.

Pye said of his stunning Oulton Park debut: "The plan all weekend was to get out in front, get away and control things from there. We knew the pace was in the car, so it was just down to me to do it. The car stayed pretty perfect all the way through."

The margin of his first win was 5.434 seconds, while the second was only 0.12 seconds after a race-long battle with Brit Scott Malvern. Because of the second-race incident with Hill, Pye is 23 points behind Malvern, who won that race and was second in both the others.

Pye, originally from Mt Gambier but based in Melbourne before venturing to Britain, is an interesting comparison with Perth's Daniel Ricciardo -- who is also 20.

The Ricciardo camp decided against taking part in the Australian Formula Ford Championship in 2006, instead opting for Formula BMW in Asia -- aided by a $50,000 scholarship.

That got Ricciardo straight into cars with aerodynamic wings and slick tyres immediately after his karting days and now -- having come through Formula Renault in Europe and Formula Three in Britain, with two titles -- he is on the doorstep of F1.

The 1.6-litre Formula Ford cars have no wings and run on radial tyres, so handling is entirely down to mechanical grip and the racing is invariably close with lots of overtaking.

Pye has had some wings-and-slicks experience in NZ's Toyota series, in which he scored five wins, five other podiums and five pole positions. But -- at the same age -- he is quite a distance behind Ricciardo, although he is on a path that has taken countless others to the top.

Ten world champions with 20 titles between them have come out through Formula Ford.

The great news for Australia is that we may now have two new irons in the fire in the quest for our next international -- perhaps F1 -- star.

Perspectives on Formula One ...
We mentioned here a few weeks ago that the post-race, behind-the-scenes F1 wraps on the BBC website by its TV pitlane reporter Ted Kravitz are enlightening -- and so it is again this week.

A few excerpts:
>> "(Fernando) Alonso and (Felipe) Massa have already used three new engines each ... so Ferrari are on their fourth new engine for both cars in China (on April 16-18) -- meaning Alonso and Massa will have used half of their eight fresh engines (allowed0 for the year -- and we're not even a quarter way through the season."

>> "How long before (Mercedes motorsport boss Norbert) Haug tempts (Sebastian) Vettel away (from Red Bull Racing) to drive for Mercedes?"

>> "(Mercedes) became the first team to break the three-second barrier in a 2010 pitstop."

>> "Renault's driver nationalities ... Polish, Russian and Chinese (test driver Ho-Pin Tung). If you'd said 15 years ago that a championship-winning team would field drivers from those previously under-represented countries, F1 people would never have believed you."

Images: Will Power - by Steve Swope for penskeracing.com AND Scott Pye - Jakob Ebrey for britishformulaford.co.uk

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