Power edges Bourdais for provisional pole

Australian driver Will Power, proving his first Champ Car World Series victory last week was not a fluke, won the provisional pole position Friday for Sunday’s Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.

The Team Australia driver nipped defending race winner and reigning series champion Sebastien Bourdais by .05 of a second in posting the fastest lap in the opening round of qualifying.

Champ Car uses a two-day qualifying format. With his lap Friday, Power is guaranteed a spot on the two-car front row for Sunday’s race, but he could lose the pole if another driver records a faster lap in the second qualifying round today.

Power ran a lap at 104.311 mph on his final trip around the 1.97-mile, 11-turn seaside street course to best Bourdais, who drives for the Newman-Haas-Lanigan team.

Bourdais’ best lap was 104.234 mph.

“Yeah, got it right at the end” of the 30-minute qualifying period, said Power, 26, who won the inaugural Vegas Grand Prix last Sunday.

“It’s just been a matter of getting the car right, but we’re still learning,” he said.

His teammate, rookie Simon Pagenaud of France, qualified third and Canadian Alex Tagliani of Rocketsports Racing was fourth.

Paul Tracy of Forsythe Championship Racing, a four-time winner at Long Beach and the 2003 series title winner, qualified fifth.

Bourdais’ teammate Graham Rahal, an 18-year-old rookie and son of former Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Rahal, was eighth.

This is Power’s second year in Champ Car, and he has now qualified on the front row in three of his last four races. He started on the pole in Las Vegas.

“Will and Team Australia are going to be right up there” this season, said Bourdais, 28, who started the year poorly by failing to finish the Las Vegas race and placing 13th.

That race “felt like a bad dream,” said Bourdais, but the Frenchman quickly bounced back at the Long Beach circuit, where he has dominated the last two years.

“We really needed to get ourselves back together after the terrible weekend we had in Vegas,” he said. “We’ll try again harder tomorrow.”

Bourdais appeared to have the provisional pole in hand with five minutes left in qualifying.

A spinout by Matt Halliday then brought out a red flag that briefly froze the field and, by the time Halliday’s car was towed clear, Power had time for only one more lap.

“I thought, ‘Well, it’s going to probably be too hard to beat [Bourdais],’ ” Power said, but “I got a clear run. The car was nice.”

Power’s win last week was the first by an Australian in the Champ Car series, and Power said it sparked a “massive” response among fans in his home country. Three Australian television stations sent reporters to cover Power and Pagenaud this weekend.

Champ Car’s races are now set by time, rather than a set number of laps, and Sunday’s race is scheduled to last 1 hour 45 minutes. Sunday’s forecast calls for partly cloudy skies with temperatures in the upper 60s.

james.peltz@latimes.com