Friday March 22nd, 2002

The Arrows team are confident they have solved the problems which have hit them at the starts of both the Australian and Malaysian Grands Prix.

Both Heinz-Harald Frentzen and teammate Enrique Bernoldi endured a nightmare race in Australia, where both their Cosworth-powered A23 refused to get moving before the start of the formation lap.

The German driver hit trouble again in Malaysia, his car suffering a problem with its launch control system which saw him getting stuck at the start of the race.

Arrows technical director Mike Coughlan is confident the team have solved all the problems, and is hoping for a strong showing at next week's Brazilian Grand Prix.

"In Melbourne with the cars sitting on the grid, the power consumption from the battery to the car exceeded the power being generated with the engine running at idle," said Coughlan. "That meant that the car ran the battery flat, causing the problem. After Australia, we did a number of grid simulations to check the systems and we know we've sorted the problem.

"Heinz-Harald's 11th place on the grid was wasted due to the launch control problems we had with his car. Once we had reset all the systems and sent him back out, he actually had a lot of pace.

We calculated, running at the pace he was, he would have been in sixth place and picked up a point, so that was obviously particularly painful for us, but goes to show the A23 has great potential."

Published at 10:33:55 GMT