Italian GP Saturday Jaguar notes

Eddie Irvine:
"This morning I thought I really should have been in the high 1:24s, but I had such a messy session. Ralf Schumacher and Frentzen – I don’t know what they're doing, but it seems that they are out there trying to mess it up for everyone. Here it's important to get a rhythm, and I never got a rhythm. The car's well-balanced, and there's a bit of time in me, but there wasn't much.

"We're losing out everywhere, but we're losing out more in the last section, which is more high speed corners. We've made the car better, there's no doubt about that. If we had come here with the car we had in Hockenheim we would have been in a much worse situation, I think. So we have made improvements. We've still got more to make."

Johnny Herbert:
"I'm disappointed that I couldn't beat Eddie, but it was pretty close. It's pretty tough for us. I felt that we were going to struggle beforehand. I wasn't feeling very confident, and I was right. It's very disappointing, because we're just not fast at all."

So where are the R1s losing out?

"Everywhere. Straightline is just one aspect of it – we changed the wing and we didn't really gain anything, so it's not working as it should."

Johnny said that he managed to get three clear runs in, although his last attempt was spoiled by a mistake.

"They were all okay except the last run, because I outbraked myself at the first chicane. Then at the next one I got one of the Arrows, who blew up at Ascari, so there were yellow flags there, and then I got the red light. It was a bit annoying because of that."