Da Matta Plays Down Quickest Time

Brazilian Cristiano da Matta played down the significance of his quickest time in today's free practice for the French Grand Prix.

Da Matta was fastest in the afternoon session for his Toyota team, popping in a quick lap of 1:15.518 as the session ended on a drying track following some heavy rain.

The showers, interspersed with sunshine and blustery conditions, continued in the afternoon and both sessions were declared wet - a decision that gave the teams until noon on Saturday to finalise their choice of tyres.

"Obviously it is nice to finish top of the timesheets in the second session today, but that does not necessarily mean anything," said da Matta. "We timed our last run to perfection and went out on a new set of tyres when the track was at its best.

"Our main objective for today was to carry out the tyre evaluation, which was pretty impossible in the ever-changing wet-dry track conditions. At least we have the two practice sessions tomorrow morning in order to do our back-to-back comparison before we have to make our final decision by noon. A very inconclusive day, really."

Da Matta's teammate Olivier Panis wound up 11th, over 1.5 seconds behind the Brazilian.

"Due to the constantly changing weather conditions it was a quite difficult day for us," said Panis. "However, we tried to concentrate on our programme and hopefully we can find some valuable information from the data in preparation for tomorrow.

"At the end of the session we decided not to go out any more with a new set of tyres and to set some faster times. Nevertheless I am really happy with the car as it looks quite competitive. It is nice to be back racing in France in front of my home fans and I hope we can give them a good result to celebrate on Sunday."