Alesi Pleased with Qualifying Effort

Frenchman Jean Alesi was happy after finishing in fourteenth place in today's qualifying for the British Grand Prix at the Silverstone track.

The veteran Prost driver, who has scored three points so far in 2001 for the French outfit, steadily improved his times throughout the session to finish the day some three tenths of a second in front of his teammate Luciano Burti. Alesi was pleased with his work and hoped it could help the team move forward in the remaining races.

"I am happy with this qualifying session because we have been able to work quietly, and every change we made on the car went into the right direction," said Alesi. "It is all the more positive as nobody could run on a dry track this morning and we had to adapt to very different conditions this afternoon.

"I have been held up a bit on my last run, which is always a pity. But the most important thing is that we learnt a lot in two days about this difficult track and all the information collected will surely help (technical director) Henri Durand to continue developing and improving the car."

Burti finished two places behind Alesi in sixteenth, the Brazilian complaining about the lack of time to fine-tune his car's set-up. Despite that, Burti was looking forward to a good race on Sunday.

"Even if it sounds easy to say that, it could have been better," Burti said. "We had to wait quite a lot, and unfortunately, we ran short of time to make the set-up changes that we wanted in the end. Therefore I went out for my last run knowing it would not be perfect.

"Until the end, I had indeed massive understeer in the car. At least, we know what area we have to work on for tomorrow which gives me confidence for the race."