Wheldon takes pole at Homestead

The two drivers could only be split on a tie-break at the end of the 2006 season - and there was just 0.028 seconds between them at the end of Friday's qualifying session on a windy evening in Miami.

2005 champion Wheldon has won at Homestead for the past two seasons, but is already thinking more about regaining his title than winning Saturday night's race.

"Obviously (Homestead) seems to be a very good place for me, but in 2007 right now everybody has zero points and nobody's won the race yet," said Wheldon.

"I think it's going to be a very, very competitive race. We've just got to make sure that we focus on the job in hand.

"We lost the championship by (number of) victories last year. If the cards are dealt to us, I'll be driving very aggressively to try and win the race. If not, then we're going to have to settle for some points.

"I'm not going to let much slip. I really feel I let a championship slip last year and I'm not going to do that again."

Hornish Jr was slightly disappointed to miss out on pole.

"It's pretty close," he said. "Judging on how some other people picked up speed from practice to qualifying, we thought we were going to be close (to pole). We were hoping to have a little more in it.

"Team Penske's been doing a great job, they obviously brought us a great car. Not quite as fast as Dan right now, but we'll work on the set-up overnight and hopefully get everything right tomorrow."

Although 2006 title rivals Ganassi and Penske filled the front row again, the resurgent Andretti-Green Racing team stopped the 'red cars' from sweeping the top four, with AGR's Dario Franchitti, Tony Kanaan and Marco Andretti earning third to fifth places.

The result came as a pleasant surprise to the drivers, who had focused on race set-ups during afternoon practice and had no idea how their qualifying settings would perform.

"I'm surprised because we didn't even do a qualifying run earlier, we just worked on race stuff," said Franchitti.

"So thanks to my engineers back there because they kind of guessed it a little bit and it seems to be okay."

"Because it's so unrepresentative (of the night conditions) during the day, we didn't want to get ahead of ourselves and start making crazy changes," Andretti added. "So far, that's worked. Fortunately enough the car came back to me. We were definitely rolling the dice."

The team's new recruit fared less well, with Danica Patrick far from happy after qualifying only 14th.

Scott Dixon (Ganassi), Scott Sharp (Rahal) and Helio Castroneves (Penske) completed the top eight, ahead of impressive full-time returnees Sarah Fisher (Dreyer & Reinbold) and AJ Foyt IV (Vision Racing), who both outperformed their teammates.

Qualifying times:

Pos  Driver             Team               Time
 1.  Dan Wheldon        Ganassi            24.9438
 2.  Sam Hornish Jr     Penske             24.9466  + 0.0028
 3.  Dario Franchitti   Andretti-Green     25.0147  + 0.0709
 4.  Tony Kanaan        Andretti-Green     25.0431  + 0.0993
 5.  Marco Andretti     Andretti-Green     25.1276  + 0.1838
 6.  Scott Dixon        Ganassi            25.1301  + 0.1863
 7.  Scott Sharp        Rahal-Letterman    25.1431  + 0.1993
 8.  Helio Castroneves  Penske             25.1459  + 0.2021
 9.  Sarah Fisher       Dreyer & Reinbold  25.1575  + 0.2137
10.  AJ Foyt IV         Vision             25.2160  + 0.2722
11.  Vitor Meira        Panther            25.2443  + 0.3005
12.  Tomas Scheckter    Vision             25.2651  + 0.3213
13.  Buddy Rice         Dreyer & Reinbold  25.2707  + 0.3269
14.  Danica Patrick     Andretti-Green     25.2848  + 0.3410
15.  Ed Carpenter       Vision             25.2975  + 0.3537
16.  Jeff Simmons       Rahal-Letterman    25.3240  + 0.3802
17.  Darren Manning     Foyt               25.4298  + 0.4860
18.  Kosuke Matsuura    Panther            25.4355  + 0.4917
19.  Marty Roth         Roth               25.5182  + 0.5744
20.  Alex Barron        Beck               25.7473  + 0.8035