IRL-First day of testing for Patrick Carpentier

CARPENTIER SHINES WITH A SIXTH-PLACE FINISH IN FIRST DAY OF TESTING


Homestead, FL (January 19, 2005) - The newly configured Red Bull 
Cheever Racing team finished up their first day of IndyCar Series 
open testing in heavy traffic on the 3.557 km road course at 
Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Today marked day one of road course testing with a full field of 
cars.  The team brought their new Toyota engine, Technical Director 
Henri Durand, and driver Patrick Carpentier along with all the team 
veterans to the put the changes to the test.

Carpentier started and ended the day in his #83 Red Bull Cheever 
Racing Dallara-Toyota-Firestone with lots of enthusiasm.

''I am very happy with today.  We made a lot of progress after the 
morning session and gained twice as much ground as the other teams, 
cutting our time behind the leader from 1.5 seconds to .8.  Everyone 
aims for first place, so we still have to work, work, work, but I 
know Red Bull Cheever Racing can do it.''

During the afternoon session Carpentier logged an impressive fast lap 
time of 179.827 km/h (1 minute, 11.2009 seconds), only .7586 seconds 
behind today's leader earning him the sixth fastest lap of the day. 
He was able to log 76 laps by days end.

For Alex Barron the day went a little differently.  It began with 
high expectations but as the day progressed some of those went unmet.

''Unfortunately, we didn't spend as much time on track as we would 
have liked to.  We had a system installation problem with the car and 
didn't get to log many laps.  I'm going to stay positive, have a 
thorough debrief with my engineers and go at it full speed ahead 
tomorrow.''

At the end of the day he had a quick lap time of 172.947 km/h (1 
minute, 13.8409 seconds) of the 25 laps he completed.  He has high 
hopes for tomorrow's session as he heads into a technical debriefing 
with the team engineers.

Ryan Briscoe was quickest of the 19 drivers on track today with a 
fast lap of 181.765 km/h (1 minute, 10.4423 seconds). He was followed 
by Tony Kanaan (1 minute, 10.8136 seconds) and Dario Franchitti (1 
minute, 10.9617 seconds).

The field heads back out on track tomorrow at 9 a.m. (EDT) for the 
second day of road course testing.  They head to the oval for the 
final day of testing on Saturday.