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Final Practice: Bourdais heads Junqueira

Sebastien Bourdais produced a quick lap in the final five minutes of Saturday morning practice that paced the Champ Car field at Laguna Seca.

The Frenchman's best effort was a 1m10.246s, a quarter-second faster than he managed in Friday's provisional qualifying session, but a similar margin behind Bruno Junqueira's provisional pole time. Junqueira ran second fastest Saturday morning on 1m10.567s despite focusing on Sunday's 90-lap contest. The Newman-Haas team leader is guaranteed a front row start thanks to his effort on Friday afternoon.

"It was a good thing is to be on the overnight pole because it gave us a chance, tomorrow morning session to work a little bit on the race set-up," said Junqueira. "That's going to be really important since the race here is going to be really difficult because this year we don't have traction control. To keep up a strong pace during the race will not be as easy as previous years. I think some people will fall off on the last 10 laps of a stint if they do not have a really good set-up."

Mario Dominguez made the day's most dramatic improvement, finding 1.6 seconds to run third on 1m10.724s, while Mario Haberfeld was again the fastest Reynard driver in fourth place. Next up was Haberfeld's quasi-team-mate Tiago Monteiro, who missed Friday qualifying after damaging his race car in the pre-qualifying warm-up session.

Laguna Seca specialist Bryan Herta broke into the 1m10s group, his 1m10.905s lap good enough for seventh place. But Darren Manning continued to grapple with a poor handling Walker Racing Reynard, and the Yorkshireman was 17th of 19 in the session.

There were several spins and red flags, though only Roberto Moreno did damage to his car. The Brazilian speared off course in Turn 6 and bent both front corners of his Herdez Lola.

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