Malaysian GP Saturday Jordan notes

Jordan Grand Prix managed to salvage ninth and tenth places on the grid for Jarno Trulli and Heinz-Harald Frentzen after a troublesome morning of practice preparing for today's qualifying session. The 60-minute qualifying session was run in hot, humid conditions, the drivers having to work hard on the twisting and fast 3.4-mile track.

'Ninth is obviously not what we had hoped for,' said Trulli. 'During the morning, I had tried running with scrubbed front tyres and it seemed okay. So, we scrubbed in two sets for qualifying but they didn't work so well and I had a struggle with understeer. I managed to get a good lap in the end but it could have been quicker if we'd had a better tyre strategy. It's going to be difficult starting from ninth on the grid - but you never know what might happen in the race.'

Having lost valuable track time thanks to an electronics problem during the morning, Frentzen and his engineers had to make an educated guess at the best set-up for his car in qualifying.

'The team did a very good job on the set-up,' said Heinz-Harald. 'After the problems in the morning, I'm quite pleased to have got onto the fifth row. I was unable to complete the necessary work on tyre strategy but to be less than a tenth slower than Jarno is not too bad. Our aim is to finish in the points at the very least and I think anything is possible, particularly over 56 laps in this heat.'

Schumacher took an easy pole position with a car which he described as being close to perfect. His Ferrari team-mate, Rubens Barrichello, was knocked off the front row when Hakkinen and David Coulthard improved to second and third in the closing minute. Coulthard and his mechanics had a brief scare before his final run when a fuel line popped off and caused a minor fire in the McLaren garage. No one was hurt.