Hunter-Reay sets practice pace

The Herdez Competition driver recorded his fast lap - a 20.722s - in the 1.5-hour evening session just under a tenth of a second quicker than the Forsythe Racing chasers of Patrick Carpentier and Paul Tracy.

"It's a good start to the weekend for sure, and I am happy with the balance of the car," said Hunter-Reay. "We had a very good test here last month and we basically just applied the set-up that we found at the test. It is a very technical oval and having a good car right out of the box is a good feeling."

Tracy was lucky not to end up in the wall after rookie Nelson Philippe closed in on him as he tried to make an outside move on the Rocketsport's driver. "He nearly pitched me into the wall while trying, like most rookies not to get into the way," Tracy said. "He was a bit shell-shocked. Everybody was out at the end of the session trying to do some qualifying speeds. I was caught out real quick."

Hunter-Reay's team-mate Mario Dominguez backed up the Herdez effort to claim fourth spot ahead of the Newman-Haas of Bruno Junqueira. Forsythe's Rodolfo Lavin came in sixth, his best performance of the season, placing him ahead of Monterrey race winner Sebastien Bourdais, who blamed his lowly position on traffic.

"We tried to make the car as fast as possible, but we got traffic on both sets of new tyres," he said. "I'm not sure we can get close to the time Ryan set, because I don't think the balance is neutral enough. We still need to work on our qualifying set-up, and we will pretty much have to guess because we are going to try to save our tyres for the race."

Dale Coyne Racing's Oriol Servia was eighth ahead of Jimmy Vasser and RuSPORT's AJ Allmendinger, who rounded out the top 10.

Newcomer Gaston Mazzacane, who replaced Tarso Marques at Dale Coyne Racing on the eve of the race (see separate story), was the slowest driver on track, 1.6s off the pace.