INDIANAPOLIS (May 7, 2003) — Robby Gordon continued preparations for the first leg of the Indianapolis/Charlotte "Double" Tuesday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, again running the No. 27 Archipelago/Motorola Dallara/Honda/Firestone in race set-up for the third day.

Gordon posted the 23rd-fastest lap of the day yesterday in preparation for the Indianapolis 500 with a best speed of 226.607 miles per hour (39.7163 seconds) among his 85 laps run. The Archipelago/Motorola team concentrated on the car’s race balance for the third day in a row, focusing on different downforce levels. Once satisfied with the race set-up, Gordon’s team began changing the car over for a simulated qualifying run.

"We put in quite a few laps today and had a good practice session," Gordon said. "We learned a lot about our race set-ups and tried some different downforce levels. I’m confident going into qualifying because I’ve got my teammates Dan Wheldon and Tony Kanaan working on qualifying set-ups while I work on race trim and they were both really fast today.

"The Archipelago/Motorola team is just a great group of guys. It is lot of work to convert the car from race trim to qualifying trim and they changed all of the stuff but we just didn’t have enough time to get back on the track today for a qualifying run today. We missed it by a couple of minutes, which isn’t that big of a deal because we still have three days left before Pole Day."

Gordon will return to action at Indianapolis Motor Speedway Thursday after taking care of a previously scheduled engagement for the No. 31 Cingular Wireless team today. His on-track activities for the Cingular car begin Friday, May 16 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in preparation for The Winston Open.

"We weren’t happy with our race setup Monday but we were yesterday," said Kyle Moyer, Gordon’s team manager. "We did some long runs Tuesday and everything looks good so we put that program away and now we are getting ready for qualifying practice Thursday. We put a lot of miles on our engine so we changed it in the afternoon and we wanted to get a quick leak check and maybe simulate a qualifying run in the last hour, but we didn’t get it in so we’ll work on that later."

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