Drivers praise unique qualifying format

The tight nature of the 1.2-mile Brands Indy circuit prompted Champ Car to stipulate modified oval qualifying rules for the Kent road course. Instead of 35 minutes of open running, each driver received four flying laps of the track, the best of which counted for grid position.

Paul Tracy's 37.006-second lap from Saturday stood up throughout Sunday's final qualifying session. Sebastien Bourdais was fastest on Sunday, demoting his Newman/Haas teammate Bruno Junqueira to third on the grid despite the fact that Junqueira's Saturday time was actually a few hundredths of a second faster than Bourdais' Sunday effort.

"I think the qualifying format is good for this venue because the track is so small," said CART championship leader Tracy. "With 19 or 20 cars out there, it would be very difficult to try and get a clear lap.

The other issue is because we don't have tyre warmers, it takes so much longer to do a run. In Formula 1, they can just do one warm-up lap because they have tyre warmers. If we ran single-car qualifying at Elkhart Lake each driver's run would take 15 minutes! So at some tracks it's not possible to do.

"If you had weather problems, you could have half the field go in the dry and half the field go in the wet at some of the venues we go to. That would be pretty difficult for some people to swallow because you want to be the last one to go and you can get caught out.

"Single-car qualifying is a different exercise than we are used to but I like it because I can always get the lap out of the car," noted Sunday's fast man, Sebastien Bourdais.