Austrian GP Friday Jaguar notes

Johnny Herbert was quite content with his day's work at the A1-Ring today, despite being only 16th fastest. "We went through our planned programme which included tyre evaluation and we have a clear direction on tyre choice for tomorrow," said Johnny. "It looked as if some teams were taking fuel out but we kept ours in all the time so in that sense we're not looking too bad.

"The balance of the car is pretty good but we can find further improvement by dialing out some of the understeer. I'm generally happy with, the progress we made today but we'll have to wait and see about those fuel loads!"

Johnny is hoping that he can repeat last year's qualifying performance, when he was sixth on the grid. "I normally like this track anyway, and I've gone well most of the time here. But it's so tight where we are. You can get half a second and be right up the front. So as I said I think we're OK, but I'm not 100 per cent sure."

Jaguar Racing's technical director Gary Anderson was pleased with Johnny's work. "Johnny had a productive day," said Gary. "Running in race trim he found a reasonable balance and managed to get on top of some of the understeer which can be an issue at the A1-Ring."

Last season Eddie Irvine won the Austrian Grand Prix, but he had a troubled start to this year's event. "A pretty frustrating day," said Irvine. "I was only able to complete half the programme I had set for the two sessions. I was troubled by a gearbox problem, which cost me any chance of nailing a quick lap in the first hour.

"We made a few internal tweaks to cure the problem in time for the second session, but I was then plagued by an electrical fault that shut everything down twice and brought a premature end to the session. I'm in no real position to deliver an accurate verdict on the car because of the time I lost."

Jaguar Racing's technical director Gary Anderson said that the true performance of the car had been masked by reliability problems: "The scoreboard may not make attractive reading but our positions are not a fair reflection of where we actually stand relative to our rivals."

"We know what fuel we ran and how we used our tyres but we can't be sure about the rest of the pit lane. I guess we'll find out for certain tomorrow. Certainly in Eddie's case he had such a troublesome day that he was unable to set a decent time. First he had a gearbox problem. We checked it over after the first session and found a fix but he then stopped out on the circuit near the end of the second session with an electrical fault."