Friday June 16th, 2000

The Minardi Formula One team suffered a break in at their pit-lane garage on Thursday night and said they were lucky to still be able to compete in Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix.

Thieves broke into the Italian team's office at the back of the Minardi garage and stole two lap-top computers. Next to the lap-tops were boxes containing their cars' steering wheels. If they had been stolen, the team could have been forced to pull out of the race.

Minardi team boss Gian Carlo Minardi said: "There was a bit of promotional stuff that got stolen, but the worst is really the loss of the two lap-tops that belong to our race engineers.

"Most of the data we lost can be retrieved from the telemetry we have stored in the bigger computers in the garage, but some of it is lost forever."