19/07/2002

French Grand Prix - Free Practice Round-Up

Panasonic Toyota Racing made a solid start to its French Grand Prix weekend when Mika Salo and Allan McNish finished the first two sessions of free practice in 7th and 11th places respectively.

The Magny-Cours circuit right in the middle of France near Nevers is a difficult circuit for the teams to cope with. Tyres as usual play a key role. The Magny-Cours surface is very smooth but with high cornering speeds as well as hard acceleration out of a couple of first gear turns the rear tyres in particular can become very hot.

Despite Salo's presence near the front of the field and a time just 1.1s slower than the best of the day Salo was cautious in his assessment.

"It wasn't such a good day for us " he said. "We had an incident early in the first session with another car that was on its installation lap which cost us time in the pits. After that we concentrated on setting up the car but I had a touch too much oversteer and we are still in search of better traction. Towards the end I stopped with an engine-related problem and unfortunately didn't manage to complete the programme that we had scheduled for the two practice sessions."

Salo's time was 1m15.161s while team mate McNish lapped his TF102 chassis in 1m15.411s.

"Friday is always difficult to read because you don't know what tyres or fuel levels other people are running but the car was improving and it felt much better towards the end of the session. Traffic is a major issue around here and it will definitely be one of the factors in qualifying although that will be the same for everyone."

Team Manager Ange Pasquali summed up the team's mixed fortunes: "A good session for us today. It's only our second time here and we learnt a lot this morning. Unfortunately we couldn't finish the second session with Mika's car because of an engine problem stopping us from looking into some details we need for tomorrow. We made some progress with the car's handling over the kerbs last week in Monza and we are seeing some results of that now."

West McLaren Mercedes topped the Friday time sheet with David Coulthard just 0.07s quicker than Kimi Raikkonen. Reigning champion Michael Schumacher was third quickest half a second clear of Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro team mate Rubens Barrichello. Ralf Schumacher was fifth for the BMW Williams F1 Team ahead of Eddie Irvine in the first Jaguar Racing entry.