Dennis offers frank qualifying excuse

Teams often come up with elaborate excuses for doing badly but Dennis openly admitted it was down to simple human error with the car's set-up. Having dominated almost all of practice David Coulthard starts seventh and Mika Hakkinen eighth - the team's worst qualifying performance of the season.

They start behind Jarno Trulli's Jordan and Nick Heidfeld's Sauber as well as two Williams and Ferraris.

"No one's perfect," said Dennis. "Sometimes you get it right and most times we do - this was one of the rare cases where we got it wrong. We had no fundamental problem other than going in the wrong direction with the set-up. We did a bad job.

"We may pay a heavy price for our grid positions but as regards out competitiveness in the race I am not at all concerned. It was only after practice when we were coming around that we realised we screwed up. "