Button happy to split McLarens

Williams were narrowly the quickest cars on the French rubber but just over half a second covered Renault, McLaren and the BMW-powered team. Once again it was Jenson Button who headed Renault's charge, and much to the Englishman's delight he managed to split the McLarens, out-qualifying David Coulthard to take sixth.

"I'm pleased!" he enthused. "The car had a good balance and handled really well. Seeing as I only managed two timed runs, I'm very happy to have qualified in front of one of the McLarens."

Jarno Trulli had been well off his team-mate's pace for much of the weekend, so much so that he decided to ditch his race car and take the spare for qualifying. He found it much more to his liking, but a series of misfortunes affected his runs and the Italian relied on a late improvement to make it into the top 10.

"Up until now, we didn't understand why I wasn't competitive, so we decided to take the spare," he said, who will start from ninth. "I took it quite easy for the first run, because there are so many unknown factors with a new car. I made a mistake during the second and came straight back into the pits, even though the lap would have been quicker. I lost the third run because of the red flag, which meant I really had to make the last one count. The car was working very well, and I finally found the pace we had been looking for all weekend."