Giorgio takes the lead for Jordan

By Phil Giles
July 2 2004

Jordan's race drivers improved on their practice times in the second free practice session for the French Grand Prix. Timo was relegated to third as Giorgio and Nick posted faster times.

All of the drivers set times in the second session, including Juan Pablo Montoya who was involved in a massive accident during the first practice session.

TIMO GLOCK
"The beginning was a bit difficult, with the track dry then wet then dry again at the end. The car felt good in the conditions, it was fun to drive and quick. Unfortunately at the end when the track had dried we had brake problems and so missed the last few minutes of the session."

NICK HEIDFELD
"It was a disappointing day for everybody really as the bad weather conditions restricted everybody’s work. It is probably more of a hindrance for our team though because we haven’t done as much testing as other teams over the last few months. We have not gathered enough data which makes it difficult to make the tyre choices and it is good this decision is delayed until midday tomorrow."

GIORGIO PANTANO
"Well it was quite interesting today! The weather changed all the time and every quarter of an hour the track was different: wet, dry, combinations of the two, and practice was quite entertaining as a result. However, it was quite difficult to understand the tyres, the set-up and everything with the conditions. In the end I think we got to understand a bit and we know the problems with the car so we’ll see what happens with the weather tomorrow."

JAMES ROBINSON
HEAD OF RACE AND TEST ENGINEERING
"Obviously everybody experienced the same very changeable weather as we did today. We felt it was important to keep Timo running to try and do the tyre work when the track was at its driest and it was about being out on the right tyre at the right time. We accomplished nowhere near as much as we wanted to but we have got some work done. We needed to do some wet running with one of the tyres that we hadn’t had a chance to run in the wet before but otherwise with two wet sessions today we decided to conserve engine miles on the race cars to assist with reliability for Sunday."

Jordan Session Times.

19. Giorgio Pantano  1min 18.711secs
21. Nick Heidfeld  1min 19.270secs
23. Timo Glock  1min 19.490secs