For Newman/Haas Racing and rest of Champ Car field
source: champcarworldseries.com This weekend's inaugural West Edmonton Mall Grand Prix of Edmonton will be run on a part-airport/part support road course and all teams in the Bridgestone Presents the Champ Car World Series Powered by Ford will enter the weekend without the usual decade or two of data from previous races here. After earning 84 wins, 88 pole positions and 209 podium finishes in their 23 seasons of Champ Car competition to date, Newman/Haas Racing (NHR) has earned a reputation for ingenuity and excellent preparation by their staff of engineers and mechanics and they hope that will give them an edge this weekend and assist their drivers to become either only the second repeat winner or sixth different one in a season full of parity. "The team has worked hard to run simulations on the computer to prepare for the new race in Edmonton," said McDonald's® driver Sebastien Bourdais who holds a slim 15-point margin over second place in the title race after six of 14 events. "They are working with the track configuration and the degrees of the corners and try to come up with a set-up for the race cars. It's always difficult the really know what to expect but I think the team has proved to be very good at that. Every time we went to a new race track the car was very good right away and hopefully that will give us an advantage over the other teams. The parity in the series is mostly due to everyone having the same setups for these cars and hopefully this will give us the edge that we need to make some gains in the championship fight." The 88-lap event on the 14-turn, 1.973-mile Finning International Raceway course on the City Centre Airport in Edmonton will mark the first of three new venues on the 14-race schedule this season and the first of two in a row as the Taylor Woodrow Grand Prix of San Jose is next on the schedule on July 31. After a dominating season that saw NHR win a combined total of nine of 14 events in 2004, they have only won two races in 2005 - Long Beach by Bourdais and Monterrey, Mexico by Bruno Junqueira, who took the points lead but was injured in the Indy Racing League-sanctioned Indy 500 shortly thereafter. Both Bourdais and Oriol Servia, who is replacing Junqueira while he recovers, were in a position to win the previous race in Toronto after each held the lead but finished fifth and second, respectively. Although new to the team, preparation is one of the things that impressed Servia when he joined the team four race ago and he went on to finish on the podium in three of those events.
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