It was a frustrating two days for Paul Tracy and his Forsythe team in the Champ Car preseason test this week at MSR Houston Raceway in East Texas as the #3 Indeck Panoz ran only a handful of laps due to a variety of problems.

During the first day the team decided to limit their laps due to wet conditions but the team failed to make the most of the dry weather on day two. The final day was expected to be more productive as the skies cleared, but the problems started during the morning session with an off track excursion that damaged the downforce-generating underbody, resulting in downtime for extensive repairs.

During the afternoon session a clutch problem surfaced which once again caused Tracy to sit on the sidelines while the Forsythe crew repaired the car. Tracy only managed to turn a handful of laps before the day ended, including his unofficial fastest lap of the day just after the chequered flag that would have moved him up several spots in the overall fast lap standings.

The most significant part of the day was a productive standing start practice in which the Forsythe team gathered a large amount of valuable data as the Champ Car World Series introduces the format in 2007.

“It's been very frustrating,” said Tracy, who was eleventh fastest of the 15 drivers in action. “That was probably the worst test of my career, basically everything that could go wrong went wrong. Once we finally managed to turn a good lap the chequered was already out so it didn't count, but it would've been good enough to put us seventh in the charts so that's encouraging considering it was our only fast lap of the test.

“But you don't get points or prizes for testing so we just have to move on and have a more productive test at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. The standing start practice was very good for us; we learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. There's still a lot of work to be done with the software but it was encouraging.”