Bourdais 2nd quick at Sebring

Inclement weather delayed the beginning of Newman/Haas Racing’s third and final day of testing at the 1.669 mile Sebring International Raceway today but the team got back to work after the lunch break at 1 p.m. ET. McDonald’s driver Bourdais set the second fastest time, behind Oriol Servia over the three days and Graham Rahal set the ninth fastest time during the test.

“We lost the first half of the day due to rain but were able to go out in the second part," said Bourdais who set the fourth fastest lap of the day with a 51.056 lap time over a total of 83 laps but his lap of 50.888, set on Wednesday stood as the second fastest overall. “We spent the first hour of the afternoon session drying the race track then we had to bed brakes because the old ones were shot. That took 25 minutes. The track was really green to start with so it was hard to set a fast time. The first run wasn’t too good. We started to try to work on the setup and a lot of red flags came out so we had to juggle. We were able to test couple of things which were interesting. Unfortunately we encountered an engine issue which lost us the last 30 minutes. It would have been better if we could have had full day to finally get going on the test plan but it was better than nothing."

“We got through some changes this afternoon which was good,’ said Rahal, who ran a total of 74 laps during the second session today with a fast lap time of 51.413 to end the day ranked seventh overall and ninth for the three day test. “We did run into a problem with the gearbox. There was a leak in a line that prevented shifting which we had to fix and it took some time. We continued to lower our times a couple of tenths over the test. Had I gotten one clear lap on the last run on new tires we could have lowered the time but just a little bit."

The 2007 Champ Car World Series season begins on April 6-8 with the Vegas Grand Prix. The series will hold tests in Houston in February and Laguna Seca in March. Newman/Haas PR