Montoya: Car Now Suits Me Better
The McLaren drivers had mixed reactions to their car's handling in today's practice sessions, despite the team maintaining their strong form, with test driver Alex Wurz setting the fastest time of the day
Austrian Wurz finished the first practice session almost a second ahead of second placed Ferrari's Michael Schumacher. In the second practice session, the McLaren driver maintained his lead, but with only seven thousandths of a second ahead of Toyota's test driver Ricardo Zonta.
"I am glad to show how competitive we are," Wurz said after practice. "I think the car and I are in best form. I could have even been a little faster, however I experienced some traffic in the first sector of my fastest lap. I now have to sit together with our engineers and my teammates for a detailed analysis of our data to work out the ideal strategy for the race."
Teammate Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen ended practice in fourth and fifth place respectively, and with almost identical times. But while Raikkonen said he was "not perfectly happy with the set up of the car," Montoya stated his car was now most suitable for his own driving style.
"I have suffered from understeer in the past races," Montoya explained. "This has been improved over the last few weeks and now the car suits my driving style much better, especially on a circuit which is notorious for understeer. We still have some work to do but overall I am generally pleased."
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