Big improvement for Panis

"I'm very pleased with how practice went for me today; fifth position is a big improvement after the last few races," he said. "We had a good test at Silverstone last week and we have taken a small step forward in terms of engine performance for this race.

"Honda has been working very hard to improve the engine race by race and we can see that beginning to show here."

Team-mate Jacques Villeneuve was seven tenths of a second and eight places behind the Frenchman, but he's taking heart in Panis' performance.

"We've seen a small difference with the engine here today and small differences always help," he said. "This track tends towards a lot of understeer which usually suits us but we're not quite there with my set-up yet. We've done a lot of work exploring the tyre options and we have a reasonably good race set-up so far but Olivier seems to have found a better qualifying set-up. Generally, I'm happy to see some improvement, however small."