With less than three weeks remaining until the Champ Car World Series season opener in Long Beach, many of the major 2006 players are gearing up by turning laps 3,000 miles away from the streets of Long Beach. source: crash.net Five of the drivers that will chase the Vanderbilt Cup this year tuned up during the first of two days of Champ Car testing at Sebring, including double defending series champion Sebastien Bourdais. Times were unavailable at the conclusion of Wednesday's test, but unofficial clockings showed the majority of the drivers taking full advantage of a very grippy track to log times in the 50-second range. "We're not out here to be the champions of Sebring," said new HVM-CTE Racing signee Nelson Philippe. "We just need to get out here, build some team chemistry and make sure we are ready for Long Beach. That's what we did today." Philippe and 2005 series runner-up Oriol Servia made their first tests of the year with their new teams today, Philippe with HVM-CTE Racing and Servia with PKV Racing. For Servia though, it was a bit more like Old Home Week than it was moving to a new team at PKV. He goes back to work for the same Jim McGee-led crew that oversaw his 2002 and 2003 seasons at Patrick Racing. "It's probably 70 percent of the guys that I worked with at Patrick that are here now and we have some unfinished business from those years that we're looking to take care of now," Servia grinned. "Overall, today was a good first day for us. We tried a lot of things but the track has so much grip because of the 12-hour race this weekend that it is harder to judge the effect of the changes."
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