THESE days Shane van Gisbergen and AJ Allmendinger are teammates at Kaulig Racing in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, but 20 years ago in 2004 the two were poles apart in where they were in world motorsport.
Kiwi van Gisbergen was just starting car racing in Formula First in New Zealand, still three years away from his V8 Supercar debut with Team Kiwi Racing at Oran Park in Sydney that came in 2007.
While van Gisbergen was just starting to cut his teeth, Allmendinger was in his rookie year in the Champ Car World Series in 2004 with rookie team RuSPORT, the team with which he’d had great success in Atlantics.
The young American scored his first Champ Car podium of the season in Vancouver in Canada and tackled the Gold Coast street circuit later that year for the first time.
However, a crash in Saturday morning practice forced his primary car to be withdrawn and he moved to the back-up chassis for qualifying and the race.
A bit of Indy Sleuth work reveals that the chassis he crashed in practice (a 2003-build Lola) and abandoned for the rest of the weekend in Queensland remains here on sale from St Louis, Missouri-based Can-Am Cars.
A complete rolling chassis less engine and electronics, it sits in the RuSPORT team’s later livery of white and yellow.
It was used again by Allmendinger in the 2005 Champ Car season and qualified on the front row and finished fifth in Portland.
Allmendinger was on course for a podium finish in Toronto but crashed with six laps to go and this chassis didn’t appear again at a Champ Car race. It was not used in the 2006 season, according to chassis history records secured by Indy Sleuth a few years back.
Can-Am Cars also has a sister RuSPORT chassis that we wrote a piece on here in 2020.
