CLEVELAND — Sebastien Bourdais highly recommended fellow Frenchman Simon Pagenaud for Derrick Walker’s Atlantic team last season.
It paid off handsomely for Walker, as Pagenaud won the 2006 Atlantic Championship, earning the coveted $2-million bonus towards a Champ Car ride.
On Sunday at the Cleveland Grand Prix at Burke Lakefront Airport, Bourdais, who won the pole, shared the front row with Pagenaud.
Bourdais qualified on the 2.104- mile, 10-turn course airport course with a pole-winning time of 56.363 seconds (at a speed of 134.514 miles per hour). But a red flag with three minutes to go prevented Bourdais from challenging the 2006 track record (56.283 seconds). Although the polesitter typically chooses the inside line at a track, tackling the 135-degree first turn is best from the outside line.
“The inside line is the obvious choice,” Bourdais explained. “It’s probably not the cleanest. The big difference is that the surface is grooved asphalt because it’s a runway. We practice (standing starts) in the pit lane where there is new tarmac, but that’s not what is on the race track. It will be tough to anticipate what kind of grip we’re going to get.” 

• Standing starts successfully continued at Cleveland, with all drivers getting off the line and through the first turn without incident. In spite of the standing start, officials still narrowed the tremendously wide, crowned, 150-foot Burke Lakefront Airport runway to 60 feet across using temporary cones for the first lap.

• Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire, LLC announced an extension of its Official Tire sponsorship of the Champ Car World Series through the 2009 season.
“We’ve had a great start to the 2007 season with four races,” Champ Car President Steve Johnson said. “Our attendance is up 20 percent, our TV audience has increased 100 percent, and our unique Web site hits are up over 100 percent. In our agreement with Bridgestone we had measurable results for our renewal. And after only four races, we’ve exceeded those results.
“Bridgestone was slammed for dropping out as the presenting sponsor of Champ Car this season. But Bridgestone hasn’t cut their budget at all from last year. They activate in our race markets. As the official tire of Champ Car, they help each track promote our races.”
Besides a safe and reliable tire, Bridgestone supplies a standard black slick tire and a red-banded alternate tire. Drivers must run both types of tires in the race. Typically, the alternates are faster by 0.5 to 1 second because they are generally softer but have reduced longevity.
At Cleveland, the alternate tire proved to be a bit slower in provisional qualifying until teams fine-tuned their setups. Graham Rahal felt he would have had pole position had he run on his option tires. Because Rahal ran a set on Friday, which at that time were slower than the standard blacks, the team saved his second set for the race. Rahal qualified fourth alongside Will Power, just over a tenth slower.

• Justin Wilson, normally a fast qualifier, ran over debris at the pit entrance lane in the Saturday morning practice, which resulted in a punctured tire. When the tire blew, the rubber tore through a section of his rear side pod. Wilson still qualified eighth in spite of missing some practice time and not being happy with his car. 
“I’m not really sure what is going on with the car, but we are going to see if we can find where we are losing time,” Wilson said. “We have a lot of work to do. But it’s a long race, and you never know what can happen.” 

• Teams have readily adapted to the new Panoz chassis, which has proven to be a good choice for Champ Car. Initially some bugs had to be worked out, especially a fuel- filling problem. But after four events and testing, the teams are much more familiar, becoming more comfortable with the new car.
“The Panoz chassis is doing a good job overall,” said Tom Brown, longtime Champ Car engineer working for Minardi Team USA. “There are still a few tiny fuel bugs to be worked out. It’s darn good for a brand-new car. Some chassis have taken several seasons to fix. The Panoz has shown more speed than the Lola.”

• Teams only had three open tests prior to the season’s start to learn the new car before competing at three back-to-back events. Most teams participated in open tests at Portland prior to that race and Elkhart Lake and Mont Tremblant leading up to Cleveland.
“The Forsythe team didn’t develop the car in the period I was out,” said Paul Tracy, who missed two races after fracturing vertebrae in a practice shunt at the Grand Prix of Long Beach. “We’ve fallen behind in terms of development. We are closing the gap, but we are a little bit further behind than some teams.”