It was business as usual yesterday as McLaren and Ferrari dominated the afternoon practice session ahead of tomorrow's Brazilian Grand Prix, despite poor weather which only occasionally offered settled racing conditions.

After a morning session marred by heavy showers, Ferrari, on a drying track, erased the stuttering start to their season at Melbourne by hanging firmly on to the coattails of the McLarens of Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard as the champions once again proved to be the dominant force.

But whereas in Australia, Ferrari had languished almost two seconds off the pace set by Hakkinen, this time Michael Schumacher was never more than seven tenths behind, the F310 seemingly cured of the nervous jitters.

Team-mate Eddie Irvine recorded the fourth-fastest time of the day. With dark thunderheads still hanging over the circuit, Schumacher cast aside the clouds hung over him in Melbourne to be third fastest yesterday morning and then to hounded Hakkinen throughout the afternoon, finishing just 0.74 seconds behind the world champion. "I am quite satisfied with today's performance as the car feels well balanced in the dry," Schumacher said. "However, it is not perfect yet, as I have a problem with a bump in one corner, where I almost lost the car twice. There is still room for improvement. I think we look in better shape than we did in Melbourne."

Irvine, pressing his claims as world championship leader was less than two-tenths of a second behind.

"In Australia I said the car was well balanced but slow. Now it's still well balanced, but not so slow," he said. "It is difficult to find a good set-up because of the bumps and the fact that the corners are very slow. But we are where I expected; behind our main competitors and seemingly pulling away from the rest. There is not much more to come from the car and the rest must now come from me."

The outlook at Jordan is a lot more ominous as the team was bedeviled by mechanical failures in both sessions. Midway through the morning session, after setting the quickest time of the wet session, Damon Hill's car began to spout flames from the engine, the result of an oil leak, and the Briton never emerged from the garage to attempt a time in the dry. That was left to team-mate Heinz Harald Frentzen who kept pace with the leaders on a drying track until smoke began to pour from the back of the Jordan 199. As for Hill, it signalled the end of the German's afternoon, and left the Jordan crew poring over the engines of either machine.

"It is going to be difficult for me tomorrow because I did not do a single lap in the dry today," Hill said.

It is an unwelcome turn of events for the team, which has previously been able to rely on rock solid reliability from the Honda engines. Jordan designer Mike Gascoyne, however, later said that the problem would not affect the team in qualifying, as both cars will today be fitted with an upgraded engine. "It's an oil system problem," he said, "which we were aware of and had been close to encountering in Melbourne. We have a fix in place in all of the newer spec engines which will run in the cars from tomorrow."

The position of best of the rest fell to Benetton's Giancarlo Fisichella, 1.4 seconds behind Hakkinen and Stewart's Rubens Barrichello, who failed to light up his home circuit, finishing the session in sixth.

The weather was very typical of Interlagos," he said of the intermittent periods of wet and dry which had confounded most of the teams' set-ups. "So to be in the top six at the end of the session means that we are in pretty good shape." EQ

Meanwhile, Minardi gave a Formula One debut to Frenchman Stephane Sarrazin. Prost test driver Sarrazin was loaned to the lowly Italian team after the team's regular pilot, Luca Badoer, fractured a wrist in a crash during testing at Fiorano last month.

Neither session favoured the 24-year-old however, finishing 16th in the morning and 20th in the afternoon.

Jacques Villeneuve, meanwhile, had his 28th birthday celebrations ruined by chronic reliability problems with his BAR, which saw him miss the entire afternoon session.

The dominating factor of yesterday's session was the rapidly changing nature of Sao Paolo's weather and if yesterday afternoon was business as usual, Interlagos in the rain could yet turn into a very profitable lottery for some.