Friday April 7th, 2000

Ferrari

Michael Schumacher: "I am reasonably happy as we have got through all the work we set out to do today, concentrating on set-up. We have had a better first day than we did at the first two races. I am sure we will be even quicker tomorrow. We can get pole position here, just as was the case in Australia and Brazil. The grandstands look a bit empty today, but I am sure the tifosi will turn out in force on Saturday and Sunday."

Rubens Barrichello: "I had a few problems with the engine at first and had to stop after three laps. The engineers quickly discovered it was nothing serious. Therefore I was able to run for all of the second hour and I went quicker every time I went out on the track. I think I can fight for pole position, even though I have not yet found the ideal set-up. Overall, I am happy with the day’s work."

Jean Todt: "Today we worked mainly on finding the right set-up for the race. The work is very important as this track is very hard on brakes and engines. Overall, the cars are going well and I think that tomorrow we will be in a position to fight for places on the front row."

McLaren

David Coulthard: We have done some good work on the car in race trim and encountered no problems., The car felt good straight away which gave us the opportunity to try several set-ups. I'm confident that we can achieve a good result tomorrow and on Sunday.

Mika Hakkinen : "We made a big step forward in the last part of the second session when we were able to maximize the set-up. However, with the yellow flags it was difficult to get an optimum lap."

Ron Dennis: Not a perfect, which was made more difficult by the every-changing track conditions and occasional yellow flags. As always, today we have been concentrating on the race therefore the times are somewhat immaterial.

Jordan

Heinz-Harald Frentzen: "We had a very good session today and I am happy with how the day went. We had no problems and were able to do lots of work on finding the best set up. The car felt good right from the first outing this morning and I think we are in good shape for the weekend."

Jarno Trulli: "The practice went very well, without any problems. Each time I went out I felt we had made improvements to the car and I am quite happy with the balance. The atmosphere at the track is great and I am looking forward to tomorrow."

Jaguar

Johnny Herbert: "The balance of the car at this stage of the race weekend is as good as I've had so far this season, which is encouraging for tomorrow. This morning's failure shows that we still have some work to do on reliability."

Eddie Irvine: "We just kept the fuel and kept the tyres. It's difficult to say much about the car, because by the end the tyres were just knackered, and I was going round for the sake of going round really! So we don't know. The floor seems better in one way, but worse in another. We will find out tomorrow, qualifying tells it all."

Paul Stewart: "Eddie was fast in this morning's session and then Johnny was seventh in the afternoon, so it was pretty good. We were doing some good set-up and tyre evaluation work. Eddie dropped down the order because he was working on some stuff, and went in a direction that he wasn't comfortable with. That wasted a bit of time, but it's all part of discovering what we want to do tomorrow."

Benetton

Giancarlo Fisichella: "This was quite a good free practice today. On new tyres the car has quite a lot of understeer and I struggled a bit with a loose rear, but in general I am quite happy with our progress and am confident of qualifying well tomorrow."

Alex Wurz: "Today we worked on chassis set-up for the race and we tried a few different things, some working better than others. We have got to grips with the car here and I think have found the right direction. We did some good work on tyres and engine mapping, so now we just need to analyze the data for tomorrow."

Pat Symonds, Technical Director: "Another good session today with solid progress on both cars. We have been chasing the balance a little bit, the cars starting with understeer but finishing the session a bit nervous. However we have done some good work on high fuel and we are satisfied with the day's work."

Williams

Ralf Schumacher: "I was quite happy with the balance of the car, we have definitely improved it since Brazil, and the engine felt pretty good too. I just made a little mistake. Fortunately the car doesn't look badly damaged."

Jenson Button: "I went out very early in this morning's session with the basic intention of just getting as many laps of the place under my belt as possible. I haven't even tested here before. During the first few laps the circuit was still damp from the overnight rain. By the time it had dried out I'd already done a lot of miles and my tyres were probably past their best. In the afternoon I was just starting to feel like I had a measure of the place when the engine stopped. I have struggled here a little bit, to be honest. I've found it a more difficult track to learn than Interlagos. You have to use the kerbs here a lot and I spent quite a lot of time getting the car set up for that and it also took me a while to get used to the best way of using the kerbs. I'm quite happy with the general behaviour of the car though. I'm quite disappointed to be down in 20th, but qualifying tomorrow is when it really counts and I'm sure we'll be looking much better then."

Patrick Head, Technical Director: "We've made quite a lot of progress with the set-up of the cars. It's a pity Jenson's car stopped when it did because it looked like he was about to significantly improve his time."

Arrows

Jos Verstappen: "We made some adjustments to the car and improved it a little bit. We had a radiator leak in the second session so we had to stop for about 20 minutes and lost some track time. This means we will still have to change the car a bit for tomorrow, but it is not too bad considering we are running with a lot of fuel, I am confident it will be good in qualifying."

Pedro de la Rosa: "It has been a very positive Friday for us. We made some changes to the car and know where we are for tomorrow, so have some answers. The car seems to be behaving very well on the circuit. Like Jos I am confident for tomorrow and very impressed with how the car is handling on this circuit."

Tom Walkinshaw: "The car seems to work well here at Imola and I am sure, despite the cold weather at Silverstone, we were able to improve the cars at the test last week. Both drivers are happy with the way things are going and are giving me confidence we can put in a good qualifying performance tomorrow."

Prost

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."

Alain Prost: "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. 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."

Minardi

Gastone Mazzacane: "We have done a good job. I feel it was a relatively positive Friday session. I completed a lot of laps and clocked loads of kilometres, which gave me the chance to try out different set-ups. I'm happy because I was able to continue with the development work, which is so beneficial both for the team and myself. I firmly believe that today has been extremely useful preparation for tomorrow's qualifying session."

Marc Gene: "I'm relatively satisfied with the car's performance on used tyres and with a lot of fuel on board. Unfortunately, on the last run I had a few problems in terms of sensitivity with the car. Overall, we have worked well on the set-up. We will now study all the data collected today in order to make the best possible preparations for tomorrow's session."