BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (July 28, 2006) -- On a hot and sunny opening day of practice for Sunday's Grand American Rolex Sports Car Series presented by Crown Royal Special Reserve Porsche 250 presented by Bradley Arant (SPEED, Live, 3 p.m. ET), Brazilian Christian Fittipaldi turned in the day's fastest time around the gorgeous 2.3-mile Barber Motorsports Park road course.
Fittipaldi piloted the No. 39 Crown Royal Special Reserve Cheever Racing Porsche Crawford to a quick time of 1:22.355 (100.540 mph) during the first of the day's two practice sessions, a time that held up throughout the afternoon session. The Brazilian is sharing the No. 39 machine for the first time with 2004 Daytona Prototype co-champion Max Papis, who also clocked the afternoon's best time of 1:23.404 (99.275 mph).
"Needless to say, I'm a very happy guy for a lot of reasons after a day like that," Fittipaldi said. "It's only Friday, but so far, so good. I drove the morning session and we worked on a lot of performance things. The car did its job perfectly, and we ended up fastest. This afternoon, we wanted to give Max as much time in the car as possible because it's his first time racing a Crawford chassis, where you sit on the right side instead of the left. He worked more on race setup things and ran on older tires in the afternoon session, and we came away with the fastest lap, again. In both situations, we ended up fastest. It doesn't get much better than that. Again, it's only Friday, but we're definitely headed in the right direction."
While the No. 39 team paced both sessions, both sessions were extremely close with 10 cars running within one second of Fittipaldi's quick time in the morning and 15 cars turning laps within a second of Papis in the afternoon. Virtually all of the quickest times were posted during the morning session.