San Jose, California, USA-31 July 2006: Tim Bridgman (Dunmow, Essex) fought his way to a strong fourth at Champ Car Atlantic Championship's San José round on the weekend, racing from 13th to just fractions off a podium finish. With adept street circuit racing skills, he brought home his best finish of the season, to make it two top-eight results in succession.

Tim Bridgman: ""We have had a great weekend here in San José. Right up to second qualifying we were running strongly in the top 10 although unfortunately some bad luck with traffic in qualifying two around this tight 50-second lap meant we had to start the race from P13.

We ran full fuel tanks in Sunday morning`s warm up so we could tune the car for the race which paid off as we had a very driveable car this afternoon.

I got a good standing start and managed to avoid the traffic jam at turn one to gain a few places. From then on it was just going to be a case of keeping my nose clean and putting the laps in. To be quick round here you literally have to be running on the walls, so it was important to keep 100 percent concentration through the whole race and ensure no mistakes were made.

I had Dirani in front of me the whole race and on the last restart I got the jump and passed him for the podium spot into the last corner. Unfortunately I had made the pass a little early-something like 0.8 of a second! So I had to let him back through as obviously you can't overtake before the green flag has officially dropped.

This is a good result for everyone at Epson Team Jensen and obviously I am very happy we have had a strong result heading into the last few races of the season. Now we need to work even harder still, get our heads down and bring in a couple of podiums to finish off the season which I think we are very capable of. We have some test days planned for after the next race so we need to make some good progress there and come back even stronger for the remaining races"

I would just like to say a big thanks to the team for their hard work; the car was faultless all weekend."

Bridgman's next race: Denver, 13 August 2006