Denver, Colorado, August 30, 2002 A bumpy and slippery street course made
life miserable for Alex Tagliani and Patrick Carpentier on Friday, as the
Team Player's drivers recorded the 16th and 18th fastest times in the first
qualifying session for Sunday's inaugural Grand Prix of Denver, the 14th
race of the season in the FedEx CART Championship.
Mexico's Adrian Fernandez, 16th overall in qualifying in Montreal last
weekend, was one of the few to have moderate success on the rough,
predominantly concrete 1.65-mile Denver street circuit. He took the
provisional pole in a time of 1 minute, 2.073 seconds (an average speed of
153.724 kms/h), .367seconds over Brazil's Christian Fittipaldi.
"It's very, very rough," Tagliani said of the Denver layout. "We tried all
kinds of combinations with the shocks and springs, and nothing seems to
work. We need a stiffer car for traction, but when you do that it becomes
difficult to stay off the wall because the car is bouncing around all over
the place. Right now, Team Player's is trying to come up with a car that
has good braking in the corners, is able to make the turn well and has good
accelerate once it comes out of the turn. As far as balance goes, we're not
even at that stage yet."
Compounding the problem in today's qualifying, the session was frequently
disrupted by red flags as a result of on-track incidents. In fact, the last
five minutes of the session ticked away under a red flag. The stoppages
made it difficult to run hot laps.