Trulli Praises New Bridgestone Tyres

Jarno Trulli praised his Jordan's Bridgestone tyres after another brilliant qualifying performance from the Italian driver in today's session for the French Grand Prix.

Trulli, who has shined most of the year in qualifying but has been unable to materialise his performancse due to Jordan's poor reliability, was again the fastest of the Silverstone-based outfit's drivers, setting the fifth fastest time behind the two McLarens.

The Italian, who apologised for holding up Ferrari's Michael Schumacher during one of his runs, was pleased with his day's work and claimed the new Bridgestone tyres made a big difference at the Magny Cours track.

"I must say that Bridgestone brought very good tyres," said Trulli. "They are a major step forward in terms of performance, especially for the race. Qualifying was tough because of traffic; it was hard to find a clear lap.

"I also have to apologise to Michael Schumacher because I made a misjudgment. I saw him coming and tried to get out of his way, but I don't think it was enough. We spoke at the end of qualifying and I explained what happened. But, overall, I'm very pleased with our qualifying performance."

Teammate Heinz-Harald Frentzen was also happy with his performance after qualifying in seventh place, especially after missing most of the practice session, but the German claimed he could have been faster.

"After a tremendously unlucky session this morning, when I spent most of the time in the pits and couldn't work on the qualifying set-up, I'm pleased with this result," said Frentzen. "So I'm happy with seventh place even if I couldn't improve my lap time because of incidents during the last two runs.

"I am only a couple of tenths away from Montoya in sixth place and I could maybe have done something about that. Still, seventh is pretty good; more than I thought might be possible at one stage this morning."