Qualifying 1: Da Matta keeps on rolling

"It's a big relief," he said. "It opens up a lot of scenarios for us and lets us focus on our race setup. The Newman/Haas team is really giving me a car that handles the way I like now, but we have to keep pushing to stay ahead."

Brack grabbed the top spot three-quarters of the way through the hour-long session, but his time was quickly topped by da Matta. Cristiano's best lap of 59.083 seconds is more than a second slower than the track record held by Helio Castroneves.

"The Newman/Haas cars have been very fast on road courses, but we're beginning to understand what we need to challenge them," Brack said. "We're close to being ready to stir things up."

Fittipaldi battled oversteer but qualified within 0.2 second of his team-mate, while Dario Franchitti was much happier than he was a week ago and slotted his KOOL Lola-Honda into fourth place. His Team Green colleagues Paul Tracy and Michael Andretti were ninth and 16th respectively.

"We're starting to get used to running the Lola chassis," said Dario. "We obviously don't know everything yet, but we're getting closer."