Frentzen in action for Prost on final day.

The Prost Acer Team completed today a three-day test session at the Magny-Cours track, which started on Wednesday morning with Czech driver Tomas Enge for the first time at the wheel of the AP04.

As scheduled, Enge continued driving on Thursday, and Heinz-Harald Frentzen took over him on Friday. The team had planned a specific programme in order to evaluate Enge and to allow him to learn the car, which he did most of the first day. He completed 63 laps with a best time of 1m 16.33s.

He spent the second day carrying out a tyre comparison and trying different aerodynamic set-ups in view of the Italian Grand Prix (Sept 16th), covering 57 laps and setting a best time of 1m 15.54s. The new Prost Acer test driver successfully ended his first two days with the team on Thursday night, and proved to be very consistent and quickly competitive.

Heinz-Harald Frentzen took over driving duties today, and completed a highly detailed programme, partly in preparation for the Italian Grand Prix. He worked mainly on suspension geometry comparisons and on various set-up configurations. This gave him the opportunity to gather further experience of the car, and the team was able to collect valuable information, which will allow them to work on a baseline suspension geometry for the 2003 Prost challenger. Frentzen successfully completed 60 laps, setting a best time of 1m 15.408s.

John Walton - Prost's Sporting Director - said: "The test had been scheduled several weeks ago to run Tomas for two days, as we signed him as our test driver for the remainder of the 2001 season. We were all very impressed by his performance, his good technical feedback and by the way he implies himself to the task in hand. He mainly learnt the car on the first day and set is best time on hard compound tyres with race fuel loads."

"On his second day, he tried some small aerodynamic elements which we will use in Monza next week, and carried out a race tyre comparison. Heinz-Harald also had a trouble-free day and overall it was therefore a very productive and satisfactory session for our team. Today's work was only interrupted by Kimi Raikkonen's accident, and the whole Prost Acer team were happy to learn he escaped unhurt and will be fit for Monza next week."