Bourdais banks front row start

The reigning champion, using the harder compound black sidewalled Bridgestone tyres, took his Newman/Haas Racing entry around in 56.851 seconds, at an average speed of 133.359mph to beat Paul Tracy by 0.16 seconds.

A few seconds later, Tracy was also demoted by Forsythe Championship Racing teammate AJ Allmendinger.

"It was a great lap," Bourdais said after the session. "I wished I could have done it earlier, but I ran into Cristiano da Matta on one run, and then encountered a spinning Rocketsports car [Tonis Kasemets], both times they were on the final corner which screwed up the lap I was on and the one I was about to start.

"But I have no complaints: the car is handling well, and I'm happy to get on the front row."

His closest opponents were disappointed: "I think I did each sector perfect," commented Allmendinger, "but never all on the same lap.

"I went onto the reds [soft compound tyres] but we need to fine-tune it a bit better on those tyres. I had a lap that was two tenths up on what I did, but the rear stepped out which ruined it."

Tracy stated: "Basically, the car is working well, and it was a bit frustrating to watch the monitor and see my name drop from first to third thanks to the last two cars going past. Again though, my car went out of balance on reds.

"Normally this year we have not had a good balance on the car and we've tried to make the difference up on reds. Today the car was perfect on blacks and I had a three-tenth gap to anyone else, and then we put the reds on, figuring they'd be three or four tenths quicker and they just weren't.

Commenting on his spin on his penultimate flying lap, Tracy said: "Like I said, on reds our car just wasn't balanced, and under braking in a straight line, the rear stepped out on me.

"With hindsight, we should have stuck to blacks like Sebastien. It would have been good to get a front row, because we haven't had one yet this year."

RuSPORT's Justin Wilson was fourth with a time three tenths off Tracy and on harder compound tyres, while teammate Cristiano da Matta who took the softer optuin wound up tenth, over a second slower, and only four tenths up former teammate at Dale Coyne Racing, Jan Heylen who was the star of the session, albeit on soft tyres.

Nelson Philippe did a fine job to take sixth for CTE Racing-HVM, two tenths shy of the second Newman/Haas car of Bruno Junqueira and a gnat's ahead of Oriol Servia of PKV Racing. Servia's teammate Katherine Legge was 13th, about a second slower.

Pos  Driver               Team                    Time             Laps
 1.  Sebastien Bourdais   Newman Haas              56.851           15
 2.  A.J. Allmendinger    Forsythe Championship    56.965 + 0.114   13
 3.  Paul Tracy           Forsythe Championship    57.011 + 0.160   15
 4.  Justin Wilson        RuSPORT                  57.312 + 0.461   13
 5.  Bruno Junqueira      Newman Haas              57.564 + 0.713   15
 6.  Nelson Philippe      CTE HVM                  57.779 + 0.928   15
 7.  Oriol Servia         PKV                      57.782 + 0.931   14
 8.  Alex Tagliani        Team Australia           57.931 + 1.080   13
 9.  Will Power           Team Australia           58.115 + 1.264   13
10.  Cristiano da Matta   RuSPORT                  58.499 + 1.648   15
11.  Jan Heylen           Dale Coyne               58.532 + 1.681   14
12.  Andrew Ranger        Mi-Jack Conquest         58.585 + 1.734   15
13.  Katherine Legge      PKV                      58.722 + 1.871   15
14.  Mario Dominguez      Dale Coyne               58.801 + 1.950   12
15.  Charles Zwolsman     Mi-Jack Conquest         58.859 + 2.008   15
16.  Dan Clarke           CTE HVM                  59.372 + 2.521   15
17.  Nicky Pastorelli     Rocketsports             59.410 + 2.559   15
18.  Tonis Kasemets       Rocketsports           1:00.530 + 3.679   14