Formula One: BAR Honda unable to translate speed into lap times
13 August 2000
Despite being among the fastest cars through the Hungaroring speed traps, Lucky Strike Reynard BAR Honda could manage only 16th and 18th positions in qualifying for tomorrow's Hungarian Grand Prix. Jacques Villeneuve and Ricardo Zonta struggled to get to grips with the peculiar characteristics of this winding circuit. Although the team improved the set-up of the BAR Honda 002 throughout the hour-long qualifying period, the track temperatures continued to rise under the fierce sunshine, making lap time improvement difficult towards the end of the session. Jacques Villeneuve Position: 16th 1min 19.937sec "We are running with maximum downforce and it just isn't enough. When it gets hotter, like this afternoon, the air gets thinner and that makes the whole problem even worse. We will have to be aggressive tomorrow in the race. I hope to stay out of trouble and be there at the end - hopefully everyone else will fall off. We are not expecting points from this position, but we'll be disappointed if we don't score some." Ricardo Zonta Position: 18th 1min 20.272sec "We made some big changes before qualifying and that made the car much more stable over the bumps. We were able to find nearly a second between the morning and the afternoon sessions and I think that if we had made those changes earlier in the day, we could have made up even more time. We just need more downforce all around the circuit." Takefumi Hosaka - Managing Director, Honda R&D "As I said yesterday, we knew that we would not be ideally suited to this type of slow circuit. Everyone tried their best to get the maximum out of the situation, but it is still a disappointing result. We are all a bit down but there is no use moping; we want to use these feelings of frustration as a launch pad for better things tomorrow." Jordan Mugen Honda had an encouraging qualifying session. Heinz-Harald Frentzen has been among the pace-setters all weekend and the German secured a place on the third row of the grid. Team mate Jarno Trulli has also shown good form in Hungary, but the Italian was a little disappointed with 12th position.