Spanish GP BAR Saturday notes

The French-Canadian put in a superb lap in the closing minutes of the session to leap up the order and equal his best grid position of the year. However, qualifying was not without incident for JV.

He had an off on his first run after running wide at the first corner because of brake problems, and the team then found the car was running with too much weight.

"I am pleased that we managed to get seventh in the end because we had a really hard qualifying session," said JV. "We found that the rear brakes were not attached on the first run and on the second run we discovered that we were 10 kilos overweight.

Jacques reckons that without his weight problems he could have gone even quicker. He said: "Once we had rectified that it was nearly the end of the session so we had run out of time to do the perfect aggressive lap."

Olivier Panis had his session ruined by traffic and will start the race from 11th on the grid. The Lyon-based driver was very unhappy with one rival in particular although ‘Olive’ typically refrained from spilling the beans on the offending driver.

"It was a difficult session and I am not happy with my final grid position," said Olivier. "During my fast lap another driver blocked me, which I am very disappointed about because he is an experienced driver in Formula 1. There was also a lot of traffic which stopped me getting another fast lap in but the car felt good today, we achieved a good balance and again the team did a great job."