If you liked the Champ Car World Series' debut at Las Vegas Motor Speedway last year, where five drivers swapped the lead 14 times and Sebastien Bourdais edged Bruno Junqueira for the win by .066s, odds are you'll love this year's return engagement source: champcarworldseries.com - David Philipps All the same technical elements that sent the Champ Car drivers swirling around the 1.5 mile superspeedway like so many balls on a roulette wheel will be in place again for next Saturday night's Champ Car Grand Prix of Las Vegas. Where last year there were 17 Lolas and one Reynard, this year all 18 competitors will be running Lola chassis. This year's aerodynamic rules are identical to the ones that produced last year's nail biter and, per usual, the cars will all be powered by the evenly-matched Ford-Cosworth XFE engine. One seemingly slight, but potentially significant, change in the proceedings is a modification in the "power-to-pass" function that affords drivers an extra 50 horsepower, enhancing their efforts to pass another competitor. Under normal circumstances, drivers get sixty seconds worth of power-to-pass during a given race, and can use that time any way they choose: from sixty, one second jabs to a single sixty second joy ride and, as is normally the case, just about anything in between. Not at Vegas "What we've done is allotted them sixty seconds, in ten second increments on each push," says Scot Elkins, Champ Car's technology director. "On the street circuits and road courses our power-to-pass procedure is very different. The way it works (there) is the driver activates the power-to-pass button (and) it stays activated until they do one of a couple of things; they either hit the brake or let off the throttle, then the power to pass disengages. "Because Las Vegas is basically a flat out race," Elkins continues, "we've set it on a timer. So one (application) will last ten seconds regardless of the throttle petal position." The complete article at champcarworldseries.com
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