PICS: Schumacher on 'fire' in France!

Michael Schumacher's bid to close the gap to Fernando Alonso in the drivers' championship almost went pear-shaped on Saturday morning when his Ferrari 248 F1 caught fire in free practice at Magny-Cours.

Luckily for the German the car wasn't badly damaged and his Ferrari mechanics restored it to full-health in the interval before qualifying, allowing him to go on take the pole for Sunday's French Grand Prix, the eleventh round in the 2006 FIA Formula One World Championship.

"We think there was a bit of excess fuel in the exhausts and it caught fire," explained Ferrari's technical director, Ross Brawn, when asked about it.

"Then we had a problem with the fire extinguisher which meant we did not put out the fire quite as quickly as we should have done. But everything is fine with the car."

"Basically just one part of the heat shield caught fire," added Schumacher in the post-qualifying press conference. "It got hot for whatever reason, probably being too close to the hot parts. That's pretty unusual, honestly, but not too much of a concern for the future because we know how to fix that but obviously it meant that we could run very little this morning and had a lot of work for the mechanics."