OCTOBER 4, 2004

Results from here and there

Brazil's Tony Kanaan won the Indy Racing League's championship at the weekend at the California Speedway but finished second in the race to Adrian Fernandez. The Andretti Green driver has won three races this year, the same as team mate Dan Wheldon, Buddy Rice of the Rahal Letterman team and now Fernandez but his consistency has been sufficient to give him the title with one race remaining, leaving Wheldon and Rice to fight for the runner-up spot.

At the Circuit de Catalunya Finland's Heikki Kovalainen all but wrapped up the Nissan World Series title with his fifth victory of the year. The Pons Racing driver finished second to Felix Porteiro (Epsilon Euskadi) in the first event and then beat his team mate Adrian Valles to lift his score to 169 points. His title rivals Tiago Monteiro and Enrique Bernoldi have 110 and 104 respectively and only a mathematical chance of taking the title with two rounds still to go. In the World Series Light class the title has already been won by Milos Pavlovic, the first Yugoslav to win an international racing title.

At Hockenheim Bernd Schneider won the final race of the DTM series while F1 hopefuls and rivals Gary Paffett and Christjian Albers fought over second place in the DTM championship, the title having already been won this year by Mattias Ekstrom in an Audi. Paffett finished the Hockenheim race in third place and so took the runner-up spot as Albers could do no better than seventh.

In the Formula 3 EuroCup event Nicolas Lapierre (Opel Team Signature-Plus) beat the new champion Jamie Green into second place in the 20th and final race, while rookie Roberto Streit (Prema Powerteam) was third. The surprise pole position man Adrian Sutil (standing in for Eric Salignon in the ASM team) led early on but then suffered an engine problem. Alexandre Premat (ASM Formule 3) finished fourth to guarantee himself the runner-up spot in the title behind Green.