Belgian GP Saturday Minardi notes

BELGIAN GRAND PRIX - Spa-Francorchamps, 29th August 1998 QUALIFYING

SHINJI NAKANO Chassis 04 21st laps 12 time: 1:55,084 "I had to finish my today's qualifying with the T-car, as the one I was using stopped when half of the time had passed and I had completed 6 laps. The engine stopped, I could not tell for which reason: suddenly it lost power. I ran back to the box, luckily I was at the Blanchimont turn, which is not that far away. I am sorry because, without all this trouble, I could have maybe scored a slightly better time."

ESTEBAN TUERO Chassis 05 22nd laps 12 time: 1:55,520 "In qualifying I made almost immediately a one and a half second better time than my free practice's, also thanks to a new type of tyre we have not used in the morning. In the following laps, anyway, I could not score an even better one. On such a long circuit, it is really difficult to 'thread' three good intermediate times in the same lap, therefore, even though my split times were sometimes acceptable, I could not score an overall good time."

TREVOR KNOWLES - (Ford Cosworth) Support engineer: "Shinji stopped on a part of the circuit where we get very little real time telemetry, because of the trees, that is why we had to wait until the car was taken back to the garage to make a first diagnosis. Now that we have looked at the car, it seems that one of the electrical fuel pumps, that provides low pressure fuel to the main fuel pump, has failed. And so, when the car was going through right hand corners - such as Blanchimont turn - there was no fuel being fed to the engine."

For tomorrow's race T-car (chassis 03) is prepared for Shinji Nakano.