By Vicki Mabbott
July 21 2002

Eddie Irvine was denied a possible world championship point today when his rear wing failed on lap 53 causing the car to spin and forcing Irv to retire from 7th place in the race. Despite this, he's upbeat about the development of the car, and went as far as to sa y the car now felt like a race car. Talking about the incident that caused him to drop out from what has been Jaguar's most competitive performance in a long time, Eddie said "That probably looked a lot more spectacular than it actually felt from inside the car. All I remember feeling is that the rear of the car just snapped at what must have been around 310kph. Luckily, it happened at the best place to have a failure on this circuit and the car simply slid into the gravel."

The Irishman was upbeat about the cars performance and had enjoyed the race, where he was gradually reeling the Renault of Jenson Button that still had it's last pit-stop to make. Eddie said "I was really enjoying the race and the charge towards Jenson Button in 6th place. I was catching Jenson and given that he had another stop to make, a precious point could have been possible here".

Still, that point was not to be for Eddie or Jaguar. After Eddie's failure they brought Pedro de la Rosa into the pits to check over his R3 as a precautionary measure. The loss of time and an early scrap with a BAR resulted in what Pedro defined as "a very boring race for me but at least netted the team a wave from the chequered flag, albeit in a lowly 9th place. As his team mate had said earlier in the week, de la Rosa felt the car was well balanced and much of the understeer problem that had been addressed quite well as this was much less apparent than at previous races.