Ray reigns with pole in Atlanta

It was the Team Menard driver's second pole this season and his second in consecutive years at Atlanta.

"I'm very happy with that," Ray said. "The team has done a great job. We have good motors, chassis and set-ups. I think we have had great performance at Team Menard all along. This is a different race than some of the ones we have raced on before this year. We knew it would be quite a bit cooler and it was less humid.

"It was a roll of the dice. We had a couple of different gears in the car and we decided to pull a higher gear. If we don't make mistakes, we can have a pretty good night tomorrow night."

Ray is the defending winner of this race after he dominated last year's event, leading 182 laps of the 208-lap race. It was the only round Ray in a disappointing season last year after taking the IRL championship in 1999.

"Ever since Indy of last year, I felt like our motor programme has got better and better and better," Ray said. "[Engine builder] Butch Meyer has built some really solid engines. He's doing a wonderful job.

"We were well-prepared coming in here. This is a team sport, and the guys did a great job. I'm pretty excited about the qualifying run. Now we have to execute tomorrow night. I'm going to pedal down and go for it. We think we've got a handle on the car."

Jeff Ward, who won the pole in the IRL's last race at Homestead, Florida earlier in the month, was the second-fastest qualifier with a lap of 216.144mph in a G-Force/Aurora. Team Menard also built Ward's engine.

"We don't see the engines until we see them at the shop and put them on the cars," Ward said. "We're close enough with the speed that Greg is running. We have a fast enough car to stay with them. The last pit stop, if he is out front, he will be tough to get around.

"So far, things are going really well this year. We'd like to get a win for the team really soon. I wasn't thinking of beating Greg Ray, I was just hoping to beat Eddie. He's real tough at these 1.5-mile tracks."

Eddie Cheever was third in a Dallara/Infiniti at 215.776 mph followed by Mark Dismore's 215.061 mph in a Dallara/Aurora and Shigeaki Hattori's 213.870 mph in a Dallara/Aurora.

"We've been working really hard with the new Infiniti 35A to get it up there," Cheever said. "It's not touching the Menard engines around here in qualifying. They've got something that nobody else has, but we're happy with the Infiniti engine. We haven't qualified this well for a long time."

In fact, it was Cheever's best ever qualifying performance in the IRL. Saturday night's race will be unusual because when the green flag waves at 7 p.m., the track will be under sunlight with track conditions rapidly changing during the course of nightfall.

"It depends on what the asphalt temperature drops down to," Ray said. "That late in the day, it's going to be quite a bit cooler. I don't think it will be a big, big change. We can make wing changes in our pit stops. We can control the corner weights a little bit. It's a little bit difficult starting with a little sunlight, then going through dusk and then under the lights. But the car is quite a bit more consistent."

Ward was the pole winner in the IRL's previous race and is hoping break into victory lane for the first time in his IRL career.

"I was disappointed at Homestead, we pitted early and went down a lap," Ward said of Homestead. "I thought we had a chance to win the race. We just got dealt some bad cards there at the end of the race."

This will be the last race before running begins for the Indianapolis 500 begins on May 6. But that doesn't mean these drivers will be conservative on Saturday night.

"We don't have any preservation at all," Ward said. "Once the green flag drops, every race counts. This is close to the start of practice for Indianapolis. Once the race starts, you have to give it 100 percent. When you putter around is when you get in trouble."