Japanese GP Prost Saturday notes

Heinz-Harald Frentzen IIII@"I tried very hard in today's qualifying. I really did the maximum to improve. I achieved the best laptime in my first outing. The second and third ones were indeed exactly in the same tenthh of a second ! I pushed like hell but could not get out of the 1'35''1 bracket. On this track, you need a perfect car balance to achieve the optimum laptime. As our car still had some understeer I believe we did the best we could do here today. "

Tomas Enge
"After yesterday's accident, I had to get used to run on new tyres and honestly, I drove a bit slower than I could have in the beginning. After my first outing I chose not to change anything on the car since the balance felt reasonably good. This is when I managed to post my best time. Then we tried some small modifications on the car but they did not help us at all and I gave up my third try to come back to the pits. Unfortunately, I made a small mistake in my last run and flatspotted my tyres. I believe this is partly due to my lack of experience of both the car and the track. For sure, it penalized me to lose yesterday's second session, but I also need to get more experienced to optimise quicker the set-up and balance of my car. So, relatively, I am quite satisfied with my final position and most of all, I am very thankful to the team : because of yesterday's crash, everybody worked very hard through the night to give me a good car today and they really did. Now I am looking forward to finishing the race in the best possible position, and to learning as much as possible from it. "

Joan Villadelprat
"Again we have mixed feelings today On one hand, we are happy that Tomas was able to get back in the game after yesterday's accident and he did a very good job considering it is his first time on this track. We are very satisfied with what he achieved since he has joined the team. On the other hand, we feel a bit disappointed with Heinz-Harald's final position. He had been very competitive since the start of the weekend but could not confirm in today's qualifying. It looks like we just did not manage to improve the car enough to reach the top ten position we were aiming at. However this does not affect our hopes for tomorrow : we managed to build a good race set-up, and our car's balance on high fuel load is very satisfactory. Therefore we feel well prepared and ready for tomorrow's Grand Prix. "

Chassis
Frentzen: AP04-06
Spare (Frentzen): AP04-01
Enge: AP04-03