But he wouldn’t say whether he’d also do that for race day Sunday – “you will find out.”He lost control of his Ferrari on turn six after initially missing a caution flag, spinning into a grass strip and then flipping when it hit a patch of rough blue painted gravel, coming to rest near the concrete wall.Before emergency workers could get through the wall, Schumacher lifted up his steering wheel and calmly pulled himself out of the cockpit. There was no serious damage to the chassis.”I was warned of yellow flags in Turn five, but I did not see them,” said Schumacher “I was really on the limit I touched the brakes a little hard and lost the back end. It looked more spectacular than it was.”Ferrari team principal Jean Todt said he had complained about the bumpy gravel on some of the corners.”They were modified, this one was not modified,” Todt said of turn six. “Obviously there have been some improvements, but this kind of accident could have been avoided.”Schumacher agreed.”I hope very much that we can make the gravel more smooth,” he said. “Right now, it’s too steep.”Friday afternoon’s practice was stopped with 25 minutes left in the hour by a red flag when Jaguar Racing’s Luciano Burti of Brazil had a tire hit grass and spin before making gentle contact with wall.

Burti took a lift back to the pits on a support crew motorcycle and was not injured.Barrichello improved by two-tenths of a second on his morning time, about a third of a second ahead of Schumacher.Barrichello’s best lap around the 3.27-mile lakeside course was 1 minute, 28.965 seconds while Trulli had 1:29.267.Schumacher was third in 1:29.284, followed by McLaren driver David Coulthard of Scotland in 1:29.324.Mika Hakkinen, who is starting his sixth season with Coulthard at McLaren, was fifth, followed by Michael Schumacher’s brother Ralf in his Williams.”The big issue at this track is to get front-end grip and I was pleased to see how well the car responded,” said Hakkinen. “I’m comfortable with where we are.”Juan Pablo Montoya, making his debut on the Williams team, was 15th fastest among 22 drivers. On one of his 18 laps around the circuit today, the Colombian ran off the track and through a grass strip without damage to his car.”I’ve been struggling a bit with the setup of the car,” said Montoya. “We had a problem with under-steering and when you have that you lose a lot of time.”. The sixth season of Super League kicks off tonight and the tempting question to ask is whether anything is going to change.

The same 12 clubs, although Huddersfield have dropped the pretence that they also, in some mysterious way, represent Sheffield, will line up and nobody seriously expects the Big Four – St Helens, Wigan, Bradford and Leeds – not to occupy the top four places going into the play-offs in September A little lacking in fresh direction, you might say. The sixth season of Super League kicks off tonight and the tempting question to ask is whether anything is going to change. The same 12 clubs, although Huddersfield have dropped the pretence that they also, in some mysterious way, represent Sheffield, will line up and nobody seriously expects the Big Four – St Helens, Wigan, Bradford and Leeds – not to occupy the top four places going into the play-offs in September. A little lacking in fresh direction, you might say.
But there are differences that go some way towards explaining the buzz of anticipation that is in the air.