Bourdais on pole again

"Yesterday was not good but the entire McDonald's team pulled together to get pole today," said Bourdais, who leads the championship on the strength of four victories so far this season. "It's a really neat feeling. This is a great racetrack - the best - so to win the pole here is very rewarding."

Bourdais' session was not incident-free, as he had an off-course excursion towards the end of the session after dropping a wheel onto the grass turning into the final corner. Fortunately he made only light contact with the tyre wall and was able to continue unscathed.

"You can't see the white line on the part of the track where I went off because it is completely covered by rubber," he explained. "I was setting up for my hot lap and I thought I was pretty far from the edge of the track, but I lost the rear of the car because the left-rear was in the grass."

Ryan Hunter-Reay will line up second on the grid by virtue of topping provisional qualifying in his Herdez Competition Lola. Secure in the knowledge that he would start from the front row, Hunter-Reay elected to conserve tyres for race day and did not improve on his Friday benchmark.

The American said: "The car was pretty good yesterday. Today we went with a bit more of a conservative approach and ran old tyres in qualifying. On our last run we put on a new set, and we just underestimated the understeer we had in the car. I went out and it was just pushing everywhere, which is really what we've been battling all season. The good news is that we'll have fresh rubber all day tomorrow."

Jimmy Vasser did a sterling job to qualify third for PKV Racing. The 1996 series champion has looked strong all weekend and was just 0.328s slower than Bourdais around the four-mile lap.

"Well, it's certainly the best opportunity we've had to win a race all season," reckoned Vasser. "You know, Sebastien has been very difficult to deal with all season long, and the pacesetter here all weekend, so he's going to be tough. But I think if we can settle in and have a good race, good fuel economy, we're going to put ourselves in a position to win."

Last year's winner Bruno Junqueira was stymied by a combination of traffic and untimely red flags and wound up a disgruntled fourth. The Brazilian also took a cross-country jaunt after misjudging his braking at Turn 5 while closely following Newman/Haas team-mate Bourdais.

Patrick Carpentier was next up in the leading Forsythe entry, 0.2s and one place ahead of team-mate Paul Tracy. The defending series champion had a messy session, running wide onto the gravel out of Turn 1 early on and then spinning off at the final corner in a virtual carbon copy of Bourdais' incident. Unlike Bourdais, however, Tracy was on a flying lap at the time, and careered into the tyre wall backwards at speed, causing heavy rear-end damage.

AJ Allmendinger was seventh quickest in the RuSPORT Lola, two places ahead of rookie rival Justin Wilson. Allmendinger felt he had left a few crumbs on the table in qualifying, while Wilson's Conquest Racing team opted to conserve an extra set of new tyres for the race. The duo were separated by Dale Coyne Racing's Oriol Servia, with Rodolfo Lavin completing the top 10.

Alex Tagliani was mired down in 13th after experiencing problems with the downshift mechanism on his Rocketsports Lola. Team-mate Guy Smith will start his first Champ Car race from 16th place after making steady progress through the day and closing the deficit to the frontrunners.

"I'm still making adjustments and getting used to the Champ Car," said the Yorkshireman. "It's a lot more physically demanding than sportscars and I feel the strain, especially in the Carousel [where the cars are pulling 4G for seven seconds] and the Kink. My plan for the race is to stay out of trouble, finish reasonably well and learn all that I can from the experience. I need to build a good base going into Denver and the remainder of the season."