Panis Celebrates Points Finish at Home

Frenchman Olivier Panis celebrated his tenth anniversary in Formula One with a points finish at his home Grand Prix at Magny-Cours.

"This eighth place is a very positive result for the team," said Toyota driver Panis after the race. "The car felt good and I drove a strong race. In my career, I have never finished a race here at Magny-Cours, so I am relieved that this record has finally changed."

It was the second points finish for the Frenchman this season, having scored a point at the Canadian Grand Prix three weeks ago.

"I pushed really hard to keep my position and a point is a point, one that I am happy to take it in front of my home crowd," he added. "We are making progress step-by-step, but we need to continue to improve the car ahead of the next Grand Prix in Britain.

"We have made good progress at the last three Grands Prix, but we need to keep increasing our competitiveness."

Panis's teammate Cristiano da Matta, meanwhile, finished in 11th position.

"The positive things we can say after today's race is that we have our reliability back and didn't suffer from any problems during the race itself," said da Matta. "We struggled in the race because we probably made the incorrect tyre choice, opting for prime rather than option.

"We cannot really blame this decision on anyone because we had wet conditions on Friday, from which we couldn't draw any conclusions, and then only 40-or-so laps on Saturday morning to decide our entire race set-up."