BAR Miss Start of Free Practice

The BAR-Honda team will miss the start of the first practice session for this weekend's French Grand Prix despite seeing a court case over the seizure of their cars by a Monaco-based company adjourned on Friday morning.

The team were confronted by bailiffs and French police on Thursday evening after a company that was involved in the introduction of former sponsor Teleglobe to the team five years ago obtained a court order to have the cars impounded.

The team met in an emergency court on Friday morning in a bid to sort the problem out and a team spokeswoman said: "The court case has been adjourned. The cars will not start the morning session."

The cars were stripped of their tyres and packed into two BAR-Honda transporters last night before signs declaring 'Objets Saises' (Seized Objects) were attached to the side of the vehicles.

The cars are still in the transporters and remain seized until a verdict from the morning court case is given. Until then the team will have to stay away from their cars and wait for the decision on whether they are allowed to race.

With no cars to work on, Canadian Jacques Villeneuve's race engineer Jock Clear spent half an hour fixing a malfunctioning coffee machine in the team motorhome, overseen in his labours by technical director Geoff Willis.

Willis told reporters BAR hoped to get the cars on track within half an hour of an eventual ruling by the court for their release. First qualifying for Sunday's race starts at 1200 GMT.

"We are negotiating with Honda for quicker warm-up procedures," he said. "It a question of warming up the engine and gearbox, getting the water in the engine hot enough. We'll plug the heaters into the car, pump hot water into them. We then have to get the gearbox warm enough.

"Everything is designed to operate at temperature, and if you just put false loads through it when it's cold all the clearances are wrong and we'll break something. We normally take about 40 minutes and we think we can get it down to 25."

Drivers Jenson Button, of Britain, and Villeneuve will not miss too much crucial running, however, because the rain in Magny-Cours means the session will only be useful for preparing wet-weather set-ups.