Nogaro test - day two: 25 May.

Williams and BAR continued their Monaco preparations at the French Nogaro circuit yesterday [Thursday], where Jacques Villeneuve smashed Mika Salo's previous lap record.

The Canadian hacked almost three seconds off his friend's previous best mark, which was set in last year's troubled BAR-Supertec, as the three drivers the team had on hand at the test completed almost 170 laps between them. Apart from Villeneuve's new 1min 15.10secs benchmark, few times were released by either team, with both preferring to produce a round-up of their testing activities at the end of the week.

Villeneuve shared his workload with race team-mate Ricardo Zonta, and test driver Patrick Lemarie, with all three pilots getting a first taste of BAR's latest engineering advance, the Athena 2000 engine and chassis management system.

The unit has already completed a lot of test mileage in the hands of Lemarie, and the Frenchman completed the opening 35 laps of yesterday's session in order to provide a baseline for the engineers at Nogaro. There are no plans to run the system on a race car as yet, with a full development programme planned for the summer months.

''We hope that this project will provide some interesting data which will allow us to combine the engine and chassis management into one system,'' revealed Honda technical director Kazutoshi Nishizawa, ''and in this test we are investigating the co-ordination of all the control technologies in a modern F1 car.''

Both Williams drivers, Jenson Button and Ralf Schumacher were in action at Nogaro, making full use of the circuit's twisting nature to prepare their cars for the similar tests of Monaco. Again, no times were released, while Button found himself stranded out on the track with a suspected hydraulic failure.

The test continues today [Friday] with both teams still in attendance.