Ryan Lewis takes fifth in race source: conquestracing.com It was a day of drama and heartbreak for the Mi-Jack Conquest Racing Atlantic Team yesterday at the Champ Car Atlantic season finale in Road America. It was the most important race of the season. The one that was going to decide who of Graham Rahal and Simon Pagenaud was going to be crowned the 2006 Atlantic Champion. Conquest Racing's Graham Rahal was well determined and focused to take the title home, but his engine had other plans. The stuck throttle safety feature kicked in during a caution period, shutting down the engine for no apparent reason, costing the team what could have been a well-deserved Championship. Regardless of Sunday's results, the team has nothing to be ashamed about; they were the dominating force all season. Things had started off well for Rahal. He was staying at the front and fighting for position with Pagenaud when a yellow flag came out on lap 4. That's when the dreaded event happened. Rahal quickly tried to restart the car but to no avail. He jumped out of the car and headed back to pit lane only to find out that his rival Simon Pagenaud had crashed out on the next lap. To make matters worse, once the car was returned to the team after the race, it started on the first try. After the race, the crew and Cosworth engineers looked at data from the Mazda-Cosworth engine on Rahal's car to find out what had caused the engine to die so suddenly. It was a problem in the stuck throttle safety feature. A feature designed specifically to cut the engine's motor if the throttle remains stuck, it thought the throttle was stuck and killed the engine and the team's hopes of winning the Championship. "It was going fairly well. We were running up front like we wanted to. Pagenaud got by me which was fine. I wasn't too concerned about that. Under yellow the motor just switched off. There's not much you can do about it at that point, it didn't want to restart. Things like that happen," said Rahal. "Its just frustrating because the next lap Pagenaud went off so if we would have continued, we would have had a better chance of winning the title.
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