He won the Swedish Formula Ford championship in 1997 when he was just seventeen source: champcarworldseries.com - Gordon Kirby He also won a couple of German Formula 3 races and took the pole for the prestigious Macau F3 all-star race in 2001, and was a convincing FIA International Formula 3000 champion in '03 with three wins, six second places and a record point total. At 25, Bjorn Wirdheim is used to winning, but his rookie year in the Champ Car World Series has been a tough one with sixth place his best result in what turned out to be his last race of the season in Las Vegas three weeks ago. Wirdheim was a Jaguar F1 test driver in 2004 and also tested for PKV Racing, hoping to land a drive beside team leader Jimmy Vasser. Wirdheim and Ryan Dalziel tested for PKV at Sebring in the fall of last year and both performed very well, but the ride went to returning 2002 champion Cristiano da Matta. "I was hoping I would stay for another year with Jaguar but when Jaguar sold the team to Red Bull I had to look elsewhere," Wirdheim explains. "So I came over and tested with PKV and they ended up taking Cristiano da Matta and I had to look at other alternatives. That's pretty much why the deal came together so late. I think it was only one or two weeks before the first race in Long Beach." In the end, Wirdheim found work with Keith Wiggins' HVM team, originally partnering fellow Scandinavian rookie Ronnie Bremer. But without any pre-season testing Bjorn had a slow start to the year. "I was pleased I was able to get a deal together with HVM," Wirdheim says. "I was a little bit concerned because we missed out on all the pre-season testing but it was a team with good results and I was really looking forward to it. The first part of the season was actually pretty difficult because of the lack of testing. I had to learn during the race weekends and there's not much time to learn when you only have two practice sessions and all the circuits were new to me as well. So it wasn't an easy task. "But halfway through the season I started getting the hang of things and my engineers started to realize what it was I was asking for. We started getting quick towards the end. We started qualifying well in San Jose. The complete article at champcarworldseries.com
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