Canadians suffer on home ground

Tracy in particular was perplexed. "We have changed everything since we did the test here," the Forsythe Championship Racing driver explained. "And I mean everything - springs, shocks, rockers, differential, aero package. But the car handles exactly like it did then.

"It's OK in fast corners, but in slow and medium speed turns, the front end just washes out. It's not like we're way off pole like in Portland. Here we're eight and a half tenths off, but there's 10 cars ahead of us.

"We're just having to slow too much for the tighter turns, and so we're not only losing time under braking, but it cripples us down the next straight. Same thing with [teammate] Oriol [Servia]."

RSPORTS' Tagliani has been quicker than his compatriot, but is 0.4 seconds off teammate Justin Wilson's quickest time around Mont Tremblant's 2.621-mile course, and almost half a second off Tristan Gommendy's provisional pole time.

On a day when the top seven cars were covered by 0.168 seconds, this left Tagliani down in eighth.

"We had a fuel pick-up issue this morning, so we did not get off to a great start," he said. "We need to improve the car because we are not happy.

"In qualifying the car did not have the balance that I wanted. At least Justin has a decent set-up, and tonight we are going to look at it and see where we can improve."

A fuel pick-up problem also afflicted Robert Doornbos' Team Minardi USA car, obliging the team to run him with excess fuel for his qualifying run, thus giving the Dutchman a weight penalty.