Coulthard ready to compete

David Coulthard will this morning climb aboard another private jet barely two days after cheating death in the air crash at Lyon.

The 29-year-old Scot will take the 55-minute journey across the Mediterranean from Nice to Barcelona where he intends to compete in Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix.

However, for all Coulthard's resilience, it will only be at 11 a.m. tomorrow, when he is strapped into the cockpit of his McLaren-Mercedes MP4-15, that he will know whether his body can stand up to the rigours of a 200-mile race.

"David is certainly pretty bruised and a bit sore," his manager Iain Cunningham said yesterday. "But he is sure he will be able to race this weekend."

Coulthard is expected to fly from Nice in a jet provided by TAG Aviation, probably a Falcon 50 or a British Aerospace 125-800. He usually uses a Learjet similar to the one he chartered from the Glasgow Rangers football club chairman David Murray which was involved in Tuesday's crash in which the pilot and co-pilot were killed.

Coulthard has expressed his sympathy to the families of the two pilots who died. "We were very lucky to walk away," he said.

He needed the jet to commute between tracks around the world, his family home in Scotland, his home in tax haven Monaco and the London flat of his American fiancee Heidi Wichlinski who also escaped the crash with bruises.

In an interview earlier this year, he said: "Last year I spent three weeks suspended in the air, particularly heading to and from the long-haul races.

"That is the average holiday for most people. It is a lot of hours, a lot of wasted downtime. Without the Lear, that would be far longer."

Coulthard will be at the centre of the world's media attention when he arrives at the Circuit de Catalunya at lunchtime today. As the winner of the British Grand Prix 11 days ago, and the man currently lying second to Michael Schumacher in the world championship points table, the Scottish driver is scheduled to attend this afternoon's official press conference where he can expect to be deluged with questions of his escape.

However, the pragmatic Scot is already concentrating his mind on exorcising the memories of his brush with death and focusing on this race, in which he has twice finished second to his McLaren team-mate Mika Hakkinen.

The Barcelona circuit is where Coulthard made his grand prix debut six years ago, shortly after the death of Ayrton Senna. On that occasion he impressed everyone with his composure under pressure and he will be relying on the same quality, which he has again demonstrated to remarkable effect over the past 48 hours, to see him through.

Coulthard has won seven grand prix in a career which has seen him break his leg in Formula Vauxhall and knocked unconscious while racing for Williams in 1995.

In the unlikely event of Coulthard deciding today that he will be unable to take part in Sunday's race the McLaren team will nominate their test driver, Olivier Panis, to race alongside Hakkinen.