Practice gets underway on Sunday morning with a damp track and the threat of rain for the race.

09:00 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/90 CF5.6

Water and grease is wiped away from Mauricio’s visor. Note that today the Cascadia restaurant ad on the PacWest cars has a white background. Does this make it any easier to read? Nope!

09:03 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/90 CF5.6

Patrick Carpentier sits in his car while setup changes are made to his Mercedes-Reynard.

09:04 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/125 CF5.6

And meanwhile, his Player’s Forsythe teammate Greg Moore sits while adjustments are made to his car.

09:06 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/180 CF5.6

Team owner Roger Penske stares out blankly while sheltering from the rain.

09:10 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/180 CF5.6

Bryan Herta is still the subject of much speculation about where he will be driving next season, if at all. It does not look like it will be for Team Rahal and his performance this weekend must have been a continuing disappointment to him.

09:23 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/500 CF5.6

Dario was third fastest in the morning warm-up. He is only five points behind Montoya in the championship and needs to do well in Vancouver.

09:23 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/500 CF5.6

The morning warm-up session ends with Gil de Ferran second fastest. However, he was the first to crash out in the afternoon’s race.

09:31 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/350 CF5.6

Robbie Gordon was driving his new Eagle chassis, with the distinctive eagle head painted on the nose in his team’s usual day-glo colors.

09:31 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/350 CF5.6

Scott Pruett checks out the warm-up performance times in his team’s pit. He was thirteenth fastest, one place higher than his starting position and the same as his finishing place in the race. Consistent, if nothing else!

09:38 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/60 CF5.6

Patrick Carpentier had trouble getting good laps in during warm-up, but had one of the best races of his career, finishing second: “I’m very happy. Our team did very good work with the car this afternoon. There’s no better place for this, with Player’s sponsoring the race along with Molson, so it was our best day in a long, long time. It’s more gratifying [than his runner-up finish at Gateway in 1997], because it’s contract time. There’s no better time or place for this one."

09:40 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/180 CF5.6

Montoya leads the field through ten laps of yellow flag caution as the race starts in a downpour that floods many areas of the track.

13:22 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/700 CF5.6

You can see how wet it is from the spray rising from Mark Blundell’s wheels. It was pretty damp in the grandstands too! Mark usually goes well in the wet and today he started fifth, rose as high as third. However, he was black-flagged on lap 60 for entering the pits while they were closed and then immediately crashed out of race at Turn 8.

13:22 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/500 CF5.6

Michael Andretti spun on lap 9 and was lapped by the field before the safety workers could get him restarted. From then on he was running his own pit stop strategy trying desperately to get back on the lead lap.

13:29 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/90 CF5.6

By lap 53, Moreno had worked his way up to third place. Then he pitted to put on slick tires, but as the crew removed the left rear tire, they encountered a mechanical difficulty. Moreno lost three laps in the process, before he could get back on course.

14:08 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/500 CF5.6

Paul Tracy ran much of the race in second place, losing it to teammate Dario Franchitti on lap 51 as he swerved to avoid a spinning P.J. Jones. And then on lap 60, as he charged to keep up, he lost control at Turn 11 and made heavy contact with the Turn 12 wall.

14:47 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/1000 CF5.6

Paul walks back down the pit road, realizing his chances to win the championship are slowly slipping away.

14:47 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/700 CF5.6

Montoya drives into the winner's box at the end of another perfect race for him. He led all but one lap of the race and this is his seventh victory of the season. “This morning during the warm-up,” he said, “the car wasn't brilliant, and I was kind of concerned about a damp track. But we did some changes after the warm-up and the car improved.”

15:10 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/1500 CF5.6

On the podium, Montoya, Carpentier and Vasser (who came third) are joined by somewhat chilly girls in grass skirts to promote the planned Hawaiian Superprix race that was cancelled a few weeks later. Note that Jimmy is attempting to obscure Juan's face with his bouquet of tropical flowers!

15:32 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/500 CF8.0

Jimmy turns his cap backwards and sprays champagne at Patrick and Juan Pablo. “Starting 16th, I was kinda hoping for conditions like we had today,” he said later. “I managed to pick up five or six positions on the track and the rest due to attrition. It was a really tough race, a mental race. I just tried to hang on, and lo and behold, we got some points."

15:33 Fujifilm Nexia A200 SS1/90 CF5.6