Cleveland, OH (My Sportsbook) - If you went to a movie producer with last weeks's Champ Car race as your storyline, you would be quickly thrown out of his office. The story would just not be believable.
Two weeks ago, talented young A.J. Allmendinger was driving for the RuSport team. But after the race in Milwaukee (he finished fourth), he was let go, fired, relieved of all his driving duties.
A couple days later he proposed to his girlfriend.
Two more days went by and Allmendinger was hired to drive the No.7 Forsythe Championship Racing machine as a teammate to veteran Paul Tracy.
Last Sunday at Portland, in his first race for Forsythe, all Allmendinger did was win the race, leading 100 of 105 laps en route to his victory. The victory was Allmendinger's first career Champ Car Series win.
Fired, engaged, hired and wins his first race over a two week span - no one would believe it.
But it did happen and now Allmendinger is in third place in the championship, 30 points out of second.
"A.J. did a helluva job and I don't think he put a wheel wrong all day," said owner Gerry Forsythe.
"I can't thank Forsythe and the whole team enough for everything they've done for me this weekend," said Allmendinger. "I can't thank them enough for what they made me feel like when I got here and how comfortable I was to get in the car, out of the car, how much fun they made this weekend go."
Can Allmendinger and his new team catch Justin Wilson and Sebastien Bourdais?
Probably not, but for at least one week its an amazing story.
Even when Bourdais doesn't win a race, he is still well up on the charts. After winning four straight races to start the season, the Newman-Haas Racing driver "slumped" to a third-place finish.
Despite the result, Bourdais holds a commanding 30-point lead over Wilson and 60 over Allmendinger.
Even Allmendinger knows it will be very difficult to make up so much ground on the two-time defending series champion.
"You know that Sebastien and Newman/Haas is probably going to, every weekend, without mechanical or an incident or anything like that, they're always going to be in the top-five or fighting for wins," said Allmendinger.
Allmendinger finished second to Tracy last year at Cleveland.
On lap 86 Alex Tagliani and the rest of the top-five took their last pit stops. Tagliani had hopes of beating Tracy to the first turn as he came out of the pits, but came out 0.945 seconds behind the leader.
Tracy continued to extend his lead over Allmendinger while Tagliani and Bourdais dropped back to fourth and fifth. He cruised into Victory Lane ahead of Allmendinger after 91 laps of a time-shortened race.
With Forsythe's winning history on the track and Allmendinger's revitalized career, it should be interesting to see how they attack Bourdais. Expect one of the two Forsythe drivers to bring home another trophy.
