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Bettenhausen Motorsports' Tom Brown deemed the past two days of running at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course a "good productive test" and Patrick Carpentier was likewise pleased.
Brown, Carpentier and Team Alumax participated in the two-day open test session conducted by CART and the information gathered should be useful for upcoming road-course events such as the June 22 Budweiser/G.I. Joe s 200 at Portland.
Carpentier s best lap on Tuesday put the Team Alumax Reynard/Mercedes-Benz 11th out of 19 cars. He wound up ninth on Wednesday. Bryan Herta was the quickest on both days.
"We actually stopped early because we accomplished what we wanted to accomplish," said Brown, the chief engineer and managing director of Bettenhausen Motorsports. "We made a lot of progress with the shocks. Brent Harvey is doing a lot of shock development work and we re going to carry on the development of those shocks as we continue to test.
"We also made tremendous gains in helping the stability of the rear of the car which has been a concern for Patrick. Overall, it was a good productive test."
Carpentier echoed the sentiments.
"We made a lot of improvements over the two days of testing," Carpentier said. "We aren't at the top and we know we have a lot of work to do, but we made huge gains this week. On Tuesday, I was running 1:11.9s and when we stopped on Wednesday, I was down to 1:07.8 so we made a good gain.
"We re coming around slowly. This is a good team and it will still take time to make improvements, but we are making progress. If we had started the season with what we know now, we would be having a much better season.
"What pleases me about this particular test is that I can feel the car more now. At Detroit, for example, I couldn't feel anything and the car was all over the place."
PIT NOTES: Carpentier is proving to be a popular television interview wherever he goes and he is attracting attention from some interesting sources. At last weekend's Detroit race, he was "introduced to Italy" by Gabriele Pedone of Italy's World Class TV. Pedone said there is considerable interest in French Canadian drivers thanks to the Villeneuves and he wanted to be first to put Carpentier on Italian TV ... When asked how Mid-Ohio looked from the cockpit of a CART Indy car, Carpentier said that he liked it. "Unfortunately, I got pretty tired in the end," he said. "It s because of the strain of racing the last three weeks and I haven't had time to train as much."
Source: CART News Service