By nGO
July 14 2006

In a hot and low grip Magny-Cours, Yamamoto encountered problems which were fixed by afternoon. Super Aguri still manage to complete most of their program regardless of this problem.

The start of the French GP weekend could have been worse, as all three cars ran a healthy amount of laps on a track, which is not delivering much grip in these hot temperatures. The team will be hoping to make more progress leading up to qualifying tomorrow.

Good start for Sato who completed 32 laps setting a best time of 1:19.996, "The weather is extremely hot and we had very low grip here at the beginning of the day. With every outing the car set-up progressed, so I am reasonably happy with the final set-up that we have found. We worked through our usual tyre programme today and the car seems to be working well considering the high temperatures. The track should continue to improve over the next two days, so we shall work further on improving the set-up tomorrow morning and hope for another good Qualifying session tomorrow."

Blocked on his fastest lap, Montagny completed 25 laps, he set a best time of 1:20.790, "Today was quite okay. This morning’s session was fine and this afternoon we had a little bit more problem with the car due to temperature, but I think it's going to be okay for the rest of the weekend. We just have to work a little bit on the set-up now and I think that it is going to be cool. Unfortunately I was held up by Wurz on my quickest lap and so my fastest time could have been a little better, but I am quite happy with our work today."

Progress was halted early on for Yamamoto in the morning, he completed 43 laps setting a best time of 1:21.969, "This morning was unfortunately not a perfect start to the day because we had a car problem and lost a lot of time so we could not complete our planned programme. We had a really hard job in the afternoon but were able to finish what we needed to achieve. The whole team has worked hard and I am happy that I could help them by supplying some good data for the rest of this weekend."

Not a bad day for Aguri, "It was a reasonably good Friday for us. Sakon suffered a problem this morning, but we rectified it and in the afternoon we were able to continue with our Bridgestone tyre comparisons, which we are relatively happy with. Taku seems quite happy with the set-up of his car, but I think that Franck may not be so happy after being held up in traffic on his quick lap. That said we've managed to complete almost our entire planned programme, so it has not been a bad day.”