Test round-up: Non-Indy teams run

Team Rahal, Newman-Haas and Patrick Racing all chose to test at the one-mile Milwaukee oval, with Rahal's Michel Jourdain Jr setting the quickest time.

The Mexican set a best lap of 23.3s in his Lola-Ford, which put him 0.4s up on Patrick's Townsend Bell, and 0.7s up on Cristiano da Matta. Jourdain did his time on Tuesday, whereas da Matta's running was limited to less than 50 miles on that day so that the session didn't count as an official CART test day.

Unfortunately for Newman-Haas, the weather deteriorated later in the week, although da Matta did manage to complete some set-up work on Thursday.

"Of the four [types of] tracks CART competes on, our short oval set-up is our weakest," he said, "and we know we need to improve in this area in order to fight for the championship."

Fernandez Racing chose the high-speed sweeps of Road America for its test venue. The team had two cars present for Adrian Fernandez and Shinji Nakano for a one-day test. Despite cold conditions, both drivers managed to perform valuable set-up work on the Lola-Honda, although no times were released.

"I love this place," said owner/driver Fernandez. "We had a good test and ran through a lot of things. We feel more confident toward the next race. Both cars ran pretty much without problems."