IRL needs Tracy’s personality

By Dan Barnes, Canwest News Service
April 20, 2009

EDMONTON — Watch 20 incredibly uneventful laps on a narrow Long Beach street course that practically prohibits passing and it hits you like a chrome horn in the rear end; the Indy Racing League doesn’t have nearly enough sizzle to sell this season.

Last season was blessed with a built-in hook, the long awaited merger of IRL and Champ Car World Series, which was set early and deep and never came loose. The bitter mid-1990s parting that almost wrecked open wheel racing in North America ended in a financially motivated reconciliation; replete with the dramatic folding of teams, elimination of venues and shuffling of drivers. Danica Patrick won a race prior to the Indy 500 and came in with her P.R. guns blazing. The buzz was back and the IRL lived off the good publicity for weeks.

But now? Unless Danica wins every race from here on in — she was a respectable though rather distant fourth on Sunday at Long Beach — the IRL will be in dire need of a front row rivalry with teeth and claws. Or at the very least a sideshow with fake nose and glasses.

And then it hits you again; the IRL actually needs Paul Tracy. Perhaps not quite as much as Paul Tracy needs the IRL, but the irascible old Canadian who was born with the heart of a racer and the conscience of a demolition derby driver can certainly serve a purpose, were he to show up in Toronto, Edmonton and points south.

He can do the clown thing just as well as he can roar to the top of the podium. Ask Sebastien Bourdais about Tracy. Ask him about the time Tracy parked his car on Bourdais’ helmet in Cleveland. While Bourdais was in it. And the race was on.

Ask Bourdais about that time in Toronto when Tracy showed up the day before a race in a wrestler’s mask and cape. The strait-laced Bourdais and Tracy the trailer park boy were the Hekyll and Jekyll of the Champ Car World Series, playing and bouncing off one another in the press conference room and on the track. Their rivalry lost its lustre toward the end only because Bourdais was a better driver on a much better team and the combination made for a string of runaway championships.

The IRL has no such gimmick going for it this season. There is no obvious villain and the reigning champ could drive through town in his Dallara, and 99 per cent of the population wouldn’t have the foggiest. His name, just for the sake of clarity, is Scott Dixon.

Exactly.

Tracy would be somewhat more recognizable to the masses, particularly if he side-swiped somebody while trying to pass in downtown traffic. It’s what he does, after all. I know the IRL cares far more about its profile in the U.S. where Tracy is less marketable, and rightly so. But he is no less a personality, no less a threat to hit a podium just because he’s from West Hill, Ont.

For now, Tracy is restricted to making an appearance in the Indy 500 and hoping for races in Edmonton and Toronto. His ride with KV Racing Technology, owned by Jimmy Vasser and Kevin Kalkhoven, was announced in Long Beach last weekend. It marks his first race at Indy since the 2002 fiasco that cost him a win he still thinks he deserved. Indy officials determined he passed Helio Castroneves on a yellow and took the checkered away from him. It came at the height of the split and there were immediate rumblings of a political motivation.

Tracy thinks he can win there again. From the sounds of it, he thinks he could win anywhere.

“Well, as I was laying on the couch watching the disaster of a race at St. Pete (in the series opener), I felt like I could get out there and clean everybody’s clock, the way they were driving,” he said in Long Beach. “So from that standpoint I feel I’ve still got the skills to do this. Like I said, my last race, you can only judge somebody on their last race, and the last race I came, I got off the couch and finished in the top five.”

That was Edmonton, where he was fourth. And that was vintage Tracy.

“We’re going to do the best we can, and we’re going there to win. Nothing else really matters to me other than winning the race. Finishing second, third, fourth is really not an option in my book.

“Obviously it’s been extremely, extremely frustrating to have only raced one time since the merger of the two series back together. It’s been a year since I competed here at Long Beach, and I only did one race last year in Edmonton. I felt that I did a good enough job to warrant being back in a car, but that didn’t transpire.”

They didn’t need him last year. Now they do.