SpeedCenter's 'Testing Spy' Ramon Avila reports from FirebirdInternational Raceway, Arizona, where several teams had set up camp lastweekend to sort out the new cars for the upcoming road course venues ofSurfer's Paradise and Long Beach.

Our photos were taken on Sunday, when Gil de Ferran and Jimmy Vasser werethe only drivers out on the track. None of the Swifts was spotted or timedthat day. Conditions were near perfect - 80 deg. with clear skies and alight breeze (5mph), plus the usual very low humidity in the Arizonadesert.

Sunday was their second day at the track. Earlier on Saturday, no carsactually lapped the track. Other bystanders on Saturday confirmed thatnobody had been out on the track.

When finally running on Sunday, de Ferran was running more laps than JimmyVasser. He went out on the track each time doing 3-7 lap stints. Sometimes onstickers, sometimes not. Ramon saw about 7 stints by de Ferran in the 2hours he was there. He went off at the chicane one time, and locked thebrakes several times in a hard braking area. Best time clocked for GildeFerran in those runs: 44.3 seconds.

Jimmy Vasser was running about two thirds the number of runs that deFerran completed. He stayed in the pits much longer than Gil, too. In each session, Vasser ran just like de Ferran, running only a very small number of laps.

Vasser in his Firestone-shod Honda/Reynard seemed to get better lap times with the same effort as Gil, who is running the same chassis/engine combo on Goodyear rubber.

However, Jimmy locked the the brakes much more frequently and even went off at the chicane two times in a row. His best laptime, clocked by Ramon, was 43.5seconds.

Being a testing session, everytime a car went went off the track, they stopped in the pits and track workers were sent out to check andclean the dusty track.

Ramon noticed that each team had their own timing beam set up on a differentpart of the track.

To back the teams up, there were also Ford and Honda transports at thetrack.

On Monday, the Target team was gone, while Gil was still running laps on histhird day of testing. The laps timed that day were not any faster thanSunday's times.

Newman-Hass was also still there, but again no Swift was seen running on the trackduring the time our reporter was present — therefore no photos or laptimes,keeping the Swift performance on road courses before the trip across thePacific a mystery — nor do we have any current Swift photos with the road courseaero-package to show.