French GP Saturday Benetton notes

Flavio Briatore, Managing Director:
"We already knew this circuit would be difficult for us after the test last week, but we didn't realise our cars would be this slow!"

Pat Symonds, Technical Director:
"During practice here you have a very limited time to sort the cars out as the tyres are only good for one lap and this was a problem that we had identified in the test, but I'm afraid had not completely comes to terms with. We seem to have got neither a good balance nor the grip we require which is what we were expecting after the test. The grid positions are extremely disappointing."

Giancarlo Fisichella:
"This is a hugely disappointing result and a very frustrating day. We have been suffering with understeer in the high speed corners and low grip in the low speed ones. We haven't managed to get the balance right either and the tyres go off so quickly it makes it really hard to get in good lap."

Alexander Wurz:
"This result is extremely unsatisfactory. At the beginning my chassis set-up was OK although we hadn't fully corrected the high speed understeer and lack of traction, then we made changes throughout the session that didn't seem to make us any faster. This morning we thought we had got to grips wih the tyres but it seems we were wrong. Eventhough we knew we wouldn't be strong here, after the test last week I had expected a much better grid position."