San Marino GP Friday Prost notes

Jean Alesi finished todays free practice for the Prost team in 14th position and although he feels the day was far from perfect, the Frenchman does admit that the team is headed in the right direction.

Jean Alesi:
"This is the best engine yet I have had from Peugeot. This first day was not perfect, far from it, but little by little we are going in the right direction and the work done by Peugeot is starting to produce positive results for my car. But there is still a big job to be done in finding the right set-up and to improve the general balance of the car if we want to be in a good position in qualifying and in the race. "

Nick Heidfeld:
"Overall, I am quite happy. My lap times are close to my teammate's, even though I could not run this morning because of an oil pressure problem. This is bad because we could not complete the program we had planned. But even if we are short on running, I improved a bit in the end and if we go on like this we should be much better tomorrow."

"Unfortunately, we weren't able to complete our program today, but we have not worked badly, knowing that we were running with heavy fuel loads and that behind the two or three best teams the times recorded are very close," added Alain Prost. "We are going to work very hard to find the best possible set-ups and we will run tomorrow in qualifying with the new evolution engine in both of the cars. We hope, of course, that our reliability will allow us to have at least one car in the top ten."