pre-race drivers meeting on Saturday evening, the drivers deliberated the best method to avoid potential crashes at the exit of the pit lane, which was changed at the request of all drivers for the 2001 race, from the exit of the Estoril turn to its entry. Qualifying classification Warm-up The drivers took to the track at 09:30 Central European Summer Time (UTC+2) for a 30-minute warm-up session in warm and dry weather conditions. All drivers fine-tuned their race set-ups against the weather conditions of the time, undertook laps in their spare cars and Barrichello changed the setting of his rear wing. Although he spun towards the conclusion of the session, Häkkinen drove better than in qualifying and he was fastest with a lap of 1 minute and 15.428 seconds, which was one-thousands of a second faster than Michael Schumacher in second. Barrichello's car was corrected from having an unbalanced car with a change of electronic settings after a technical meeting and he placed third and Coulthard was fourth. Fifth was Trulli, Räikkönen placed sixth and Panis came seventh. De La Rosa, Heidfeld and Irvine were in positions eight to ten going into the race. Race The race took place in the afternoon from 14:00 local time. Weather conditions at the start were hot and clear. The air temperature ranged between and the track temperature was from . The hot weather increased the possibility of mechanical attrition. Approximately 120,717 people attended the event. A two-stop strategy was the standard for the French Grand Prix and every pit stop took less time because of pit lane layout. Häkkinen could not get off the grid at the start of the formation lap because an assembled component in his car's gearbox was incorrectly fitted. His car was pushed back into the pit lane where the mechanics were unable to rectify the problem and Häkkinen did not take the start. De la Rosa's throttle failed during the formation lap and drove back to the pit lane and started one lap behind the rest of the field. When the five red flags extinguished to signal the start of the race, Ralf Schumacher made a brisk start to maintain his pole position advantage going into the first corner and retained despite an error at the Adelaide hairpin. Michael Schumacher in second was slower off the line due to a minor glitch between the launch control system and