Bourdais on provisional Cleveland pole

The Frenchman set a smooth 56.961 seconds marker on his seventh lap of the allotted 15 to leave his competitors shooting for second, a position taken by Will Power on his final hot lap.

Yet the Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing driver expressed surprise that no one beat him.

"It was harder to do a lap in the final part of the session because there were so many cars out there," Bourdais said. "On the second run there was a car in front and the gap was yo-yoing around between us.

"And you know, it's hard to get into a rhythm when you have just one lap to do it. This is a circuit where you want to put a string of laps together. You need to get into a rhythm. So I think we were a little bit lucky not to get beaten."

Power was reasonably content with his performance, pipping Team Australia teammate Simon Pagenaud at the last.

"It's really easy to overdrive this circuit because of the wide entries to the corners," Power said. "And then as the track gripped up I got more and more understeer. I just needed a good, clean lap."

Pagenaud, by contrast set an excellent time in the first half of the session, but like Paul Tracy, wasted his time trying to get the softer compound red-walled tyres to work in the second half of the session.

The only other driver to try reds in the session, Graham Rahal in the second Newman/Haas/Lanigan car, managed to use them to boost himself into seventh.

Said the Frenchman: "It was a very, very good run I did on the blacks, just behind Sebastien, but we need to look at our set-up this evening, because our car just didn't work on the reds, and normally these are tyres I like - I feel confident on them.

Justin Wilson, pole-winner at the previous round at Portland, got within half a second of Bourdais, but he and RSPORTS teammate Alex Tagliani wound up fourth and sixth in a grid where second place to 12th was covered by little more than 0.5 seconds.

Neel Jani was an excellent fifth for PKV Racing, out performing teammate Tristan Gommendy by almost half a second.

Oriol Servia - and his crew - performed a heroic job to put his Forsythe Championship Racing entry into eighth place.

The Catalan's differential broke at the end of the 10 minutes pre-qualifying session, leaving him with just nine laps-worth of time to set a quick lap.

Team Minardi USA teammates Robert Doornbos and Dan Clarke clocked the ninth and 12th quickest times respectively, while Ryan Dalziel put his Pacific Coast Motorsports entry into 14th.

Pos  Driver              Team                       Time
 1.  Sebastien Bourdais  Newman/Haas/Lanigan        56.961
 2.  Will Power          Team Australia             57.301 + 0.340
 3.  Simon Pagenaud      Team Australia             57.338 + 0.377
 4.  Justin Wilson       RSPORTS                    57.427 + 0.466
 5.  Neel Jani           PKV                        57.535 + 0.574
 6.  Alex Tagliani       RSPORTS                    57.652 + 0.691
 7.  Graham Rahal        Newman/Haas/Lanigan        57.658 + 0.697
 8.  Oriol Servia        Forsythe Championship      57.722 + 0.761
 9.  Robert Doornbos     Minardi Team USA           57.745 + 0.784
10.  Paul Tracy          Forsythe Championship      57.782 + 0.821
11.  Bruno Junqueira     Dale Coyne                 57.811 + 0.850
12.  Dan Clarke          Minardi Team USA           57.855 + 0.894
13.  Tristan Gommendy    PKV                        57.978 + 1.017
14.  Ryan Dalziel        Pacific Coast Motorsports  58.238 + 1.277
15.  Jan Heylen          Conquest                   58.259 + 1.298
16.  Katherine Legge     Dale Coyne                 58.681 + 1.720
17.  Alex Figge          Pacific Coast Motorsports  59.117 + 2.156