Summary: In this paper we investigate the use of abstract interpretation techniques for statically preventing race conditions. To this purpose we enrich the concurrent object calculus \(\mathbf {conc}\varsigma\) by annotating terms with the set of ``locks'' owned at any time. We use an abstract form of the object calculus to check the absence of race conditions. We show that abstract interpretation is more flexible than type analyses, and it allows to certify as ``race free'' a larger class of programs.