Long Beach: Walker Racing Friday notes

WALKER RACING COMPLETES FIRST DAY OF QUALIFYING

Long Beach, CA (April 13, 2007) - Walker Racing hit the pavement in full force for Atlantic provisional qualifying today as they zoomed around the 1.968 mile Long Beach street circuit.

Joining the team this weekend was Brit Ryan Lewis, who missed the season opener last week in Las Vegas.

The Walker Racing squad ran into a bit of bad luck as they fought with the clock and traffic. Early on in the session Lewis brushed the wall, taking a lot of time out of the session to fix the #15 NCPI Solutions/Mazda-Cosworth/Swift/Cooper chassis, putting the 22 year-old in 17th position with a time of 1:18.240, 90.552 mph.

De Silvestro also had a tough day as she had problems with her brake balance adjuster, resulting in inconsistent braking, slowing her times down. The Swiss Miss clocked a fast lap time of 1:17.825, 91.035 mph, putting her P14 on the grid.

Stay tuned as the team takes part in practice at 8:00 a.m. PT.

What they had to say.....

Ryan Lewis: "It's good to be back in the car. We had a really strong session this morning, unfortunately the change we made to the car, we didn't quite anticipate the way track the track to heat up like it did, which is one of those things. We know which way we are going to go tomorrow."

Simona De Silvestro: "Today was okay. There was some traffic and a long red flag that caught us, but we still need to work on the car. Our car was running well, but unfortunately I was unable to get a clear lap in, but we will see tomorrow."

Derrick Walker: "We made some changes from this morning's practice, but the track has changed quite a bit now and clearly the changes we made are not what the car needs. These sessions are fairly short and if you don't come out of the box with a pretty close car, it's tough to get it back. We know what we need to do, so we will go back and pull out another setup out of the box."

-credit: wr