oversteer en route to qualifying 19th. Jos Verstappen, 20th, was unable to adapt to the high-downforce circuit in his Arrows car. The Minardi drivers qualified their underpowered cars in 21st and 22nd; Marc Gené outqualified his teammate Mazzacane by two-tenths of a second after the latter went wide onto the grass during his fastest lap and lost nearly half-a-second. Qualifying classification Warm-up The drivers took to the track in hot and sunny weather at 09:30 Central European Summer Time (UTC+2) for a 30-minute warm-up session. The circuit was cleaned by rainfall the evening before. Teams used the session to adjust and check their race and spare cars before the race. Coulthard went fastest with ten minutes to go with a lap of 1:19.261. The Ferrari cars were second and third—Michael Schumacher quicker than his teammate Barrichello and was 0.120 seconds slower than Coulthard. Ralf Schumacher was fourth in his Williams car. Häkkinen set the fifth-fastest time, 1.2 seconds slower than his teammate Coulthard, due to him encountering traffic on his best lap. Frentzen was the last of the top six fastest drivers. Coulthard drove one installation lap in the spare McLaren alongside the start-finish straight in an effort to clean up his grid position on the right-hand side of the track. Irvine entered the pit lane with smoke billowing from his car due to an engine failure. Race The race started before 120,000 spectators, (with 30,000 from Finland), at 14:00 local time. It ran for 77 laps over a distance of . The conditions on the grid were dry before the race; the air temperature was and the track temperature ranged between ; conditions were expected to remain consistent throughout the race. It was warmer than the morning's warm-up session and drivers were required to consume a large amount of water to cope with the physical demands of cockpit temperatures and the circuit. Every driver except for De La Rosa began on the extra soft tyre compounds. Whilst the grid was forming up, Mazzacane had a gearbox problem and he was required to start in his spare car. Herbert also planned to use his spare car as his regular car developed a leak which was fixed before the start. When the event began, Coulthard made a slow start on the dirty section of the track. His teammate Häkkinen had more momentum than Michael Schumacher and steered right to pass him