Irvine Fears Qualifying Struggle

Irishman Eddie Irvine feared his Jaguar team will struggle again in Saturday's qualifying despite a promising start to their Brazilian Grand Prix.

Jaguar ran a back-to-back test with both last year's car and the R3 at Barcelona last week, and decided to continue using the problematic new machine dispute struggling in the first two races of the year in Australia and Malaysia.

The Milton Keynes team got off to a better start on Friday, when Spaniard Pedro de la Rosa set the tenth quickest time in practice, while teammate Irvine was down in 14th place. The Ulsterman, despite being happier with the handling of his car, feared that Jaguar would struggle in tomorrow's qualifying.

"The car has definitely improved in handling terms," said Irvine. "I'm suffering from some high-speed understeer, but that shouldn't be too difficult to dial out. Our main problems are aero-related and the changes we undertook between sessions made some difference to the car's balance.

"It's hard, however, at this stage to predict where we'll qualify, but given that we are nearly a second and a half slower than last year, I think we might struggle again. Until we make some fundamental steps forward on the aero side, we can't realistically hope for any better at this stage."

De la Rosa was also satisfied with his Cosworth-powered R3 despite a mechanical problem that caused him to spin during the afternoon session.

"We achieved a fair amount of work and undertook some pretty major changes on the mechanical side," explained de la Rosa. "In the end, we found a reasonable set-up, but not perfect. I couldn't make the most of my new set of tyres because I suffered from a mechanical problem that caused me to spin towards the end of the second session.

"Overall, however, we have more mechanical grip here compared to the last two races and I'm sure we'll improve the set-up before qualifying."