CANADIAN CARNAGE; Will Power wins a wild one in Toronto.(Competition)

Byline: STEVEN COLE SMITH

Several admitted Paul Tracy fans stood at the fence, watching the Grand Prix of Toronto's first lap on the JumboTron television. Halfway around, a crash involving nearly half the 17-car field took out Tracy, and you could hear the air come out of the crowd.

"Well,'' said one Tracy fan to the others, "that didn't take long.''

This wreck wasn't Tracy's fault, though the grim but not entirely unexpected reality of having Toronto's 38-year-old favorite son eliminated without completing a single lap was compounded by the fact that the crash was caused by the other Canadian driver, Alex Tagliani, tapping rookie Simon Pagenaud. This sliced Tagliani's tire and sheared off Pagenaud's front wing, which lodged under Tracy's car and sent him into the wall. Out for good were Tracy, Tristan Gommendy, Alex Figge, Jan Heylen and the consistently unlucky Katherine Legge, who said, "I came around turn seven and saw carnage in front of me.''

The other drivers involved, including Pagenaud and Tagliani, were able to continue. But only eight cars ran at the end of the one-hour, 45-minute race, with just five on the lead lap.

Initial and subsequent carnage, much occurring when the already slick, narrow track became downright treacherous as rain started falling after the first scheduled pit stops, led to a moderately unlikely podium: Team Australia's Will Power won, his second victory since the Las Vegas opener. PKV's Neel Jani was second, followed by RSports' Justin Wilson. Interestingly, Tracy's spirit seemed to have been channeled by Wilson, who was a bull while the rest of the field was his personal china shop.

After Team Minardi driver Robert Doornbos' mildly controversial win in Quebec ("Le Winner, Le Whiner,'' AW, July 9)-he was accused by Newman-Haas-Lanigan's Sebastien Bourdais of improper blocking-it might seem additionally controversial that Bourdais, who Power noted is always "tentative in the rain,'' was rear-ended by Doornbos 67 laps into the 73-lap race, ending Bourdais' day. Doornbos was able to continue after changing a front wing, and neither driver made much of it. Doornbos made "a small mistake,'' said Bourdais, who saw Doornbos coming up too fast and said he thought to himself, "Here we go again!''