Warm-up: Jordan mixes it with McLaren

But in the final session to fine-tune race configurations, Jordan-Honda confirmed it could be a dark horse for victory by taking the second and fourth best time. Pole-sitter Michael Schumacher was fifth, but unflustered in his Ferrari.

Jarno Trulli was the man in second, banging in a lap just 0.188s slower than Coulthard. The Italian lines up fourth for this afternoon's race, with team mate Heinz-Harald Frentzen fifth.

In early morning temperatures that barely broke the 10 degrees C mark, the other Honda-powered team, British American Racing, took sixth and 11th, thanks to Olivier Panis and Jacques Villeneuve respectively. But those low temperatures again seemingly hampered the Michelin attack. Sauber's Kimi Raikkonen made it seven Bridgestone-shod cars in the top seven, with Ralf Schumacher's eighth-placed Williams-BMW the first of the Michelin-equipped machines.

Rubens Barrichello's Ferrari and Eddie Irvine's Jaguar completed the top 10 - the latter the fastest man through the speed traps.

In bright sunshine and against the Apocalypse Now background of hundreds of incoming helicopters, the McLaren men traded the top time throughout the session.

Running representative race fuel loads, Coulthard was top in the opening minutes, then demoted by Hakkinen with eight minutes of the half-hour session remaining. But with three minutes to go, DC snatched it back, then hung back for a clear track and comprehensively shattered the benchmark with a 1m22.994s flyer.

If an example is needed of how much the tyre war between newcomers Michelin and Bridgestone has slashed lap times, Coulthard's lap was 3.223s faster than Mika Hakkinen's fastest race lap from last year's GP.

At the 'blunt end' of the timesheets, Jenson Button was 19th fastest for Benetton-Renault, one place behind his team mate Giancarlo Fisichella. Luciano Burti was slowest of all for Prost after Minardi's Tarso Marques was prevented from taking up his customary position at the bottom of the table. The Brazilian will not start the race after failing to qualify within 107 percent of the pole time.

For complete warm-up results, click here.