Carpentier and Tag in 14th and 15th place Surfers Paradise, Australia- Team Player's drivers Patrick Carpentier and Alex Tagliani completed their first qualifying session today for the Honda Indy 300, round 17 of the CART FedEx Series to be held Sunday in Surfers Paradise, Australia. Carpentier sits 14th on the provisional grid. He posted his best lap time of 1 minute 33.506 seconds around the 4.498-kilometre (2.795-mile) temporary road course on his last lap, averaging 173.178 km/h. "We are looking for speed and grip right now. The car is very unstable and I'm sliding all over the place. The rear end is so lo pas et je manque de puissance.e curves. Team Player's has its work cut out but I'm sure they will have solved the problem for tomorrow morning's practice." His teammate Tagliani also had trouble has he finished 15th overall Tagliani posted his fastest lap time of 1 minute 33.770 seconds (172.690 km/h) in the second half of the session. "We blew an engine after three or four laps and Team Player's had to remove the new aerodynamic devices from the main car and install them on the back up. That took quite some time. Right now, the car doesn't have any grip and we ran only six laps during this session. It's quite disappointing for all." Bruno Junqueira, the fastest of the 18 drivers entered in the Australian round, sits on the provisional pole as he posted a record lap time of 1 minute 31.515 seconds (176.946 km/h). With three minutes to go, the Brazilian driver edged Canadian Paul Tracy (1:31.575) by a mere six hundredths of a second. Third quickest was New-Zealander Scott Dixon, followed by Brazilians Cristiano da Matta and Tony Kanaan. Drivers will return on track Saturday at 9:45 a.m. local time (7:45 p.m. Eastern Time Friday) for the second and second practice session.
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