Prost hopes for unpredictable weather

Team boss Alain Prost and lead driver Jean Alesi agree that this could be the only way that the troubled outfit will stand a chance of troubling the frontrunners.

Alesi was briefly third on the grid during qualifying as the conditions changed by the second, but with the track virtually dry by the end of the hour, he was pushed down to 15th, two places ahead of team-mate Nick Heidfeld.

'Anything was possible,' Alesi admitted. 'My car began to behave well in the middle of the session when the track conditions were part-dry, part-wet and it got better and better.

'But it was our first real opportunity to run in the dry at Silverstone and we are still suffering from not having done enough running.'

'We could, without a doubt, have been better placed on a partly-wet circuit to the end,' Prost agreed. 'We are all disappointed and I don't know if we will have resolved our reliability problems by tomorrow.

'But we are starting to have better experience of this circuit and the set-ups we need so we must do our best to seize the opportunities which come our way in the race.'

Heidfeld felt he would have gone quicker had his engine not gone sick late in the session. The Peugeot V10 eventually died on his in lap.

'I could feel it decreasing and sounding unclear,' he explained. 'Without this I might have done better in the end. But we were not really able to find the right set-up for the car because we did not complete enough testing mileage.'