A film-terminated fibrillar interface has been shown to result in significant enhancement of adhesion and static friction compared to a flat control. This enhancement increases with interfibril spacing. In this, the first of a two-part study, by studying die effect of rate on adhesion and static friction, we show that both adhesion and static friction enhancement are due to a crack-trapping mechanism. For adhesion, as measured by an indentation experiment, an analytical model is used to relate the applied indenter displacement rate and measured forces to contact line velocity and energy release rate, respectively. The two mechanisms for adhesion enhancemcnt-varying rate and crack-trapping-are found to be coupled multiplicatively.