Bourdais bounces back in practice
Sebastien Bourdais proved that losing his provisional pole was but a minor hitch in his plans to dominate the Grand Prix of Houston, when he set the fastest time in Friday afternoon's free practice session
The Newman/Haas driver was in a class of his own for much of the session, and eventually worked down to a 59.020 seconds, but Justin Wilson ran him closer than he's been all weekend.
The RuSPORT driver ended the session second quickest, 0.231 seconds off the championship leader.
Wilson's teammate AJ Allmendinger missed the quickest part of the session when he was one of many spinners, losing his car under braking for Turn 5 and nudging off his rear wing against a tyre wall.
Mario Dominguez of Forsythe Championship Racing left it late but hooked some fine laps together to join Bourdais and Wilson in the sub-minute category to go third quickest. Teammate Paul Tracy, by contrast, was seventh quickest.
Two teams that looked a lot more competitive this afternoon were PKV Racing and CTE Racing-HVM.
For PKV, Oriol Servia and Katherine Legge wound up fourth and ninth, separated by 0.8sec, while Nelson Philippe and Dan Clarke were fifth and sixth for HVM, despite limited track time for both in last night's qualifying session.
Final qualifying will be run in hotter conditions than last night's session, commencing at 3:45pm local time - rather than Thursday's 7:45pm.
Pos Driver Team Time Laps 1. Sebastien Bourdais Newman Haas 58.550 77 2. Mario Dominguez Forsythe 58.896 + 0.346 76 3. Justin Wilson RuSPORT 59.251 + 0.701 71 4. Oriol Servia PKV 59.312 + 0.762 81 5. Paul Tracy Forsythe 59.348 + 0.798 66 6. Bruno Junqueira Newman Haas 59.359 + 0.809 65 7. A.J. Allmendinger RuSPORT 59.387 + 0.837 63 8. Alex Tagliani Team Australia 59.644 + 1.094 78 9. Nelson Philippe CTE HVM 1:00.031 + 1.481 42 10. Will Power (R) Team Australia 1:00.304 + 1.754 85 11. Dan Clarke (R) CTE HVM 1:00.342 + 1.792 58 12. Katherine Legge PKV 1:00.558 + 2.008 93 13. Cristiano da Matta Dale Coyne 1:00.752 + 2.202 69 14. Andrew Ranger Mi-Jack Conquest 1:00.824 + 2.274 64 15. Charles Zwolsman Mi-Jack Conquest 1:00.924 + 2.374 77 16. Nicky Pastorelli Rocketsports 1:01.147 + 2.597 94 17. Jan Heylen Dale Coyne 1:01.148 + 2.598 66
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