Free practice 1: Barrichello edges Schuey

The championship leader ran slightly wide as he exited the final corner and banged both left hand wheels against the wall. Initially he continued to push, but as his car started slewing sideways down the straight he was forced to back off and coast his car back to the pits for inspection.

At the time of the incident, Schumacher held a comfortable advantage over his team-mate, but Barrichello improved by over half a second on his final run to outpace the German by just fractions of a second. Giancarlo Fisichella also improved as the session drew to a close to move into third, but the Jordan was almost a second slower than the Ferraris ahead of it.

As expected McLaren returned to its pre-Monaco form and although David Coulthard and Kimi Raikkonen were fourth and fifth they were 1.2s behind Barrichello. Coulthard's session was interrupted by a trip over the gravel at Turn Six and Raikkonen was one of many drivers to straightline the chicane.

In the final five minutes Heinz-Harald Frentzen kept the crowd entertained with a series of spins. First of all he lost it on the exit of Turn Four, but as he tried to spin-turn the Arrows back in the right direction he applied too much power and spun again and was almost collected by Barrichello as the Arrows sat motionless on the racing line. With just minutes of the session remaining, the team instructed him to stay on track, but this gave the German an opportunity to further spoil his tyres with an off at the hairpin.

Despite his excursions, it was a good performance from Frentzen and he was sixth quickest. Enrique Bernoldi was up in fourth for a while, but the Brazilian's session ended early after he put his Arrows into the wall at T7. He dropped back to 17th in the final reckoning.

Olivier Panis used the new BAR to good effect to be seventh quickest, one place ahead of Felipe Massa, who made the early running. Juan Pablo Montoya was the fastest Williams in ninth, while last year's winner, Ralf Schumacher, was a disappointing 16th. Pedro de la Rosa rounded out the top 10 for Jaguar, while team-mate Eddie Irvine was 12th, Jenson Button a lacklustre 14th and on his first visit to the track Allan McNish was 20th..