at the Magny-Cours circuit on 14–16 September. Coulthard set the fastest time on all three days of testing. Williams, Jordan and Stewart ran for only two days at Magny-Cours. Ferrari ran their pairing Irvine and Mika Salo at the team's test circuit of Mugello. Ferrari test driver and Minardi driver Luca Badoer performed engine development work at their test track at Fiorano with Irvine performing shakedown runs. Benetton performed aerodynamic mapping tests at RAF Kemble with Arrows and Minardi electing not to test. Practice and qualifying Two practice sessions were held before the Sunday race—one on Friday from 11:00 to 14:00 local time, and a second on Saturday morning between 09:00 and 11:00. The first practice session took place in dry conditions. The ambient temperature was and the track temperature was during the hour-long period. Saturday afternoon's qualifying session was held from 13:00 to 14:00 local time. Each driver was limited to twelve laps with the implementation of a 107% rule to exclude slow drivers from competing in the Sunday race. The session was held on a wet track – the result of previous rainfall with isolated showers a few hours before qualifying. The ambient temperature ranged between , while the track temperature ranged between . Frentzen clinched second pole position of his career, in his Jordan 199, with a time of 1:19.910. Although he was dissatisfied with earlier problems finding the ideal setup during practice—he said that he felt fantastic to be on pole position—he believed he could have made a faster lap, as he was carrying five laps worth of fuel on board. Frentzen was joined on the front row by Coulthard who was two-tenths of a second slower. Race On race day the track was dry but the start was delayed when Alessandro Zanardi and Marc Gené lined up out of sequence on the grid, necessitating another formation lap. As the start was aborted during the start lights' sequence, the top five qualifiers and Jean Alesi actually jumped the start but were not penalised due to the aborting of the start. When the race finally got under way, Frentzen led from Häkkinen, but further back there was trouble at the first corner. Damon Hill's Jordan suffered an electrical failure in the middle of the pack which caused Alexander Wurz to swerve into Pedro Diniz, sending the Sauber into a barrel roll. The safety car was deployed while