06/07/2003

French Grand Prix Race Report

Frenchman Olivier Panis scored his second finish points of Panasonic Toyota Racing's 2003 Formula 1 World Championship campaign when he passed the chequered flag in eighth place at Magny Cours his home grand prix.

Both TF103 race cars proved reliable throughout the race and team mate Cristiano da Matta came home 11th to achieve the team's third double-finish of the season.

Panis said: "This was a positive race for the team. We are making step-by-step progress and hard though this might be to believe considering that I made my F1 debut in 1994 this was the first time in my career that I have ever finished a race at Magny Cours let alone scoring points that was one record that I definitely didn't enjoy holding! The car was good all race but we need to work towards finding a bit more pace to challenge the established teams."

Da Matta meanwhile said: "It was a finish and on the plus side it is good to see that both cars enjoyed 100% reliability. From the performance point of view however I wasn't entirely happy with the competitiveness and I think that translates right back to Friday morning when we lost the dry running and so our tyre choice became a result of about 40 laps on the track on Saturday."

A largely processional race produced the second successive 1-2 result for the BMW Williams F1 Team in seven days as Ralf Schumacher again beat team mate Juan Pablo Montoya.

Five times world champion Michael Schumacher finished third for Scuderia Marlboro Ferrari but was able to extend his championship advantage over Kimi Raikkonen. The Finnish driver and team mate David Coulthard finished fourth and fifth for West McLaren Mercedes. Mark Webber scored another three points for Jaguar Racing and Rubens Barrichello had to be content with seventh place in the second Ferrari after spinning off on the opening lap. Olivier completed the top 8.

Panasonic Toyota Racing team principal Ove Andersson said: "It's always a relief to score points and see no mechanical problems as a reward for everyone's efforts. It is a solid result and good for Olivier to score at home. We have some improvements due on the car for Silverstone so hopefully we can continue our upward trend."

The team had two special guests on race day. Ex-F1 driver and team boss Guy Ligier was in the Panasonic Toyota Racing motorhome and met up with his former driver Olivier whilst French actor Jean Reno - star of the movie Leon as well as highly successful Toyota advertisements in Japan - was bombarded with autograph requests mainly from the mechanics in the Toyota garage!

'Who is your favourite driver? ' one TV crew asked him 'Olivier Panis ' he answered! Toyota definitely has a new fan!