Champ Car Holiday Gift Ideas for the Racing Fan
A hot gift item for the nostalgic race fan will be a limited-edition full-color special commemorative 32-page Sebastien Bourdais booklet. Officially licensed by Champ Car, the booklet is on sale for $10 at www.champcarstuff.com, with proceeds going to Paul Newman’s Association of Hole in the Wall Camps. The book relives Bourdais’ five-year stint with the Series including his unprecedented four consecutive Championships. A special version of the book was presented to Bourdais and team owners Paul Newman, Carl Haas and Mike Lanigan at the recent Champ Car awards banquet.
While the Bourdais book will have you relive many of the great Champ Car moments of the past five years, you may prefer to do so via the Champ Car HO Slot Car Set Long Beach Grand Prix edition by AFX. The set includes a pair of controllers, enough track for a 16-by-9-foot layout with which you can build layouts of Long Beach as well as the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, Cleveland and Surfers Paradise tracks, among others. The cars are 1/64th scale (HO) replicas of Champ Car’s biggest rivals—Bourdais and 2003 Champion Paul Tracy. Additional replicas of Will Power’s Team Australia car and Justin Wilson’s CDW car also are available.
For collectors of miniature racing cars, Champ Car and SPEEDGEAR offer a variety ranging from the new 1/18th scale Greenlight Collectibles to the spectacular 1/10th scale, hand-built DP01s by Brinkworth Models. Greenlight offers a version in the Troy Lee Designed Champ Car World Series livery as well as the 2007 versions of the cars driven by Bourdais, Tracy, Power, Robert Doornbos, Graham Rahal, Neel Jani and Alex Tagliani. These cars are currently available with pre-order status.
For the history-minded fan, Carousel 1 offers a 1/18th scale replica of the Eagle driven in the 1966 Indianapolis 500 by Dan Gurney, one of the original founders of Champ Car.
The annual Champ Car calendar makes for a great stocking stuffer as do the yearbooks from the 2006, 2005 and 2004 seasons. Information on other Champ Car products and merchandise such as shirts, sweaters, caps, mugs, key chains, driver posters and team gear can be obtained at www.champcarstuff.com and www.speedgear.com.