#55 Kanaan Mid-Ohio Saturday Qualifying Notes/Quotes

Tony Kanaan #55 Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing Honda-Reynard Miller Lite 200 - Practice Notes/Quotes - Friday, Aug. 10, 2001 Mid Ohio Sports Car Course - Lexington, Ohio - 2.258-mile Road Course Round 13 of 21 on the 2001 CART FedEx Championship Series Tony Kanaan and his #55 Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing Honda-Reynard will start on the inside of the fourth row for Sunday's Miller Lite 200. Kanaan recorded a fast qualifying lap today of 1 minute, 6.196 seconds (an average of 122.799 mph) around the 2.258-mile Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, good for seventh overall. Kanaan qualified in the second ("fast") group today. Teammate Alex Zanardi, in the #66 Pioneer-WorldCom/Mo Nunn Racing Honda-Reynard, qualified in the first group, posting the seventh-fastest time of that session and putting him outside the 10th row for Sunday's race. Zanardi's fast lap was a 1.07/068 (121.202 mph) effort that was 20th overall. Gil de Ferran was today's fast qualifier in 1:05.442 (124.214 mph), and alongside him on the front row will be his teammate Helio Castroneves, who posted a fast lap of 1:05.877 (123.394 mph). Patrick Carpentier qualified third in 1:05.905 (123.341 mph). Race time Sunday is noon EDT with a live broadcast set for ESPN. Today's qualifying sessions will be shown on a tape-delayed basis at 1 a.m. EDT Sunday on ESPN2. The Sunday-morning warm-up show CART2DAY is set to air at 10:30 a.m. EDT on ESPN2. TONY KANAAN "Well, if you look at the last race and see that we started on the pole, seventh on the grid should make us not very happy. But at this place, it's not so bad as it would be at other tracks because there are places to pass here. The car developed a push that we just could not solve. The track changed a lot since this morning and we took a little bit of a risk with the setup. It was a good call, in my opinion. But the track wouldn't come to us. That's the way it is. We have a good race car. If you look our last race on a permanent road course at Portland, we started way in the back. So this weekend's performance is a reflection of the hard work my crew has been putting in since then. They never gave up and stuck with the program. I've got them to thank for giving me a competitive car. I think it's going to be a run race."