Barcelona test, day 5: Honours almost even

British American Racing's Panis set a blistering time on the fifth day of F1 testing at Circuit Catalunya to finish the day ahead of world champion Michael Schumacher. The Frenchman put in a lap of 1m20.79s, which was 0.2s faster than Schumacher's pole time from the 2000 Spanish Grand Prix, in last year's BAR 02, and also managed to take third place on the time sheets in the 2001 car.

The BAR 03 was heavily criticised by Jacques Villeneuve after the former world champion drove the car at Jerez last week, but Panis' times from today go some way to proving the car is not all bad.

"To be honest, I'm very happy," said Panis. "We've improved a lot since Jerez. We've found out what the problems were and solved some of them. There are still some problems with the set-up and there's too much understeer which I couldn't get rid of today.

After last season's terrible reliability, when completing more than ten laps was feat in itself, Jarno Trulli buoyed Jordan at the wheel of the EJ11 with a faultless run of 31 consecutive timed laps. The Italian completed 85 laps in total throughout the day and set a fastest time of 1m21.89s, just 0.34s behind Panis in the BAR 03.

"I'm just so happy," said Trulli, "and so are all the team and Honda. I didn't do any set-up work, just reliability and nothing broke. It's nothing like last year. I'm a long way from my ideal set-up, but we can work on that later."

Schumacher, meanwhile, completed a tyre development programme in his 2000-spec Ferrari, before the new car is launched on Monday.

"We have worked a lot on tyres," said Schumacher. "Especially with the first two races of the season in mind. On top of that we tried a few traction control solutions."

Jos Verstappen was third fastest and continued develeopment work on the AMT engine which will power the Arrows this year. The Dutchman's running was cut short due to limits on engine mileage and also certain components, which are due to arrive from the team's Leafield base, requiring replacement.



Olivier Panis, BAR-Honda (2000 car) 1m20.79s, 16 laps
Michael Schumacher, Ferrari, 1m21.33s, 88 laps
Olivier Panis, BAR-Honda (2001 car) 1m21.55s, 24 laps
Jos Verstappen, Arrows-AMT, 1m21.71s, 32 laps
Jarno Trulli, Jordan-Honda (2001 car), 1m21.89s, 85 laps
Darren Manning*, BAR-Honda (2000 car), 1m22.08s, 7 laps
Marc Gene*, Williams-BMW, 1m22.83s, 46 laps
*denotes test driver
N.B. All cars on Bridgestone bar Williams