Fire puts end to Day Three of Jerez Test

The penultimate day of testing for the BMW WilliamsF1 team would see Juan-Pablo Montoya finish the day last after suffering a failure with his FW24, which would see his running for the day come to an end.

After two days of testing with Marc Gene, Juan Pablo took over and for day three. As he was completing his installation lap his FW24 was to be seen with flames emerging from the back. The fire was quickly extinguished and early reports put the cause as been a fault in the fuel system. The fire was to melt several rear-mounted components preventing Juan Pablo from carrying out any further testing on the day.

"Just after Juan Pablo's installation lap this morning, we suffered a fire that concluded our running today," explained Tim Newton, WilliamsF1 Test team manager. "Juan safely exited the car in 4.1 seconds and our attentions have been focused on the preparing of the car for tomorrow."

Of the other teams present it would again be McLaren driver Kimi Raikkonen who would set the fastest time, breaking the lap record for the second successive time.

Raikkonen would set the time completing seventy two laps while conducting tyre testing and set-up evaluations for McLaren. He spun several times but was pleased with the car.

Toyota's Mika Salo was second quickest, just under a second slower than Raikkonen, followed by BAR’s Olivier Panis, Renault’s Jarno Trulli, and Raikkonen’s team-mate David Coulthard.

Ferrari’s test driver Luciano Burti set the fifth best time driving a 2001-spec F2001. In sixth was Fernando Alonso, the Spaniard restricted to just 26 laps after suffering two engine failures in his Renault.

Behind him was Jaguar’s Pedro de la Rosa who was testing a revised version of the Cosworth CR3 V10, and Patrick Lemarie in the Athena-spec 2001 BAR-Honda 003.