Friday September 20th, 2002

BAR's Olivier Panis set the fastest time of the final day of testing at the Barcelona circuit today, where BAR were running alongside McLaren, Jaguar and Williams in preparations for next weekend's United States Grand Prix.

The Frenchman was not testing prior to today's session, and his time was just a fraction faster than McLaren's David Coulthard, who set a best time of 1:18.520 after completing a massive 106 laps.

Coulthard's time was over a second slower than his best time of yesterday, and over 1.5 seconds slower than test driver Alex Wurz's best time of the week, 1:16.938, set on Wednesday.

Antonio Pizzonia continued testing for Jaguar for the second day in a row, improving his time of yesterday by almost a second.

BMW-Williams continued testing with Marc Gene today, despite having planned to wrap up their session yesterday.

Today's times:

Pos  Driver     Team                   Time      Laps
 1.  Panis      BAR-Honda         (B)  1:18.373    54
 2.  Coulthard  McLaren-Mercedes  (B)  1:18.520   106
 3.  Pizzonia   Jaguar-Cosworth   (M)  1:18.647    58
 4.  Gene       Williams-BMW      (M)  1:19.103    63

All Timing Unofficial