Newcomer Rocquelin gets Newman-Haas back on track.

Christian Fittipaldi is scheduled to run at California Speedway today [Tuesday] in Newman-Haas Racing's first outing since the end of the 2001 season.

The Brazilian is slated to perform a two-day tyre test for Bridgestone, and will be behind the wheel of the 2001-spec #11 Kmart Toyota-Lola as well as the #6 Texaco-Havoline example that team-mate Cristiano da Matta drove to victory in the recent CART FedEx Championship finale Marlboro 500.

The test will provide the first at-track experience for the team's new race engineer Guillaume 'Rocky' Rocquelin since he joined NHR in early December. Rocquelin was most recently the race engineer for Scott Dixon, who was named 2001 Jim Trueman CART Rookie of the Year, at PacWest. Prior to graduating with honours, and first in class, with an engineering degree in France in 1992, Rocquelin worked with Reynard Racing Cars in England in 1992 as part of its graduate training programme.

After a one year compulsory stint in the French National Service, where he served as a sergeant, he rejoined Reynard and worked for the following five seasons on the CART Champcar programme with drivers such as Michael Andretti, Jimmy Vasser, Patrick Carpentier and Alex Zanardi - enjoying championship seasons with Vasser and Zanardi - prior to joining British American Racing's Formula One team as race and test engineer for the 1999 season. For the 2000-2001 seasons, Rocquelin was a race engineer for PacWest Racing.