Raikkonen cool despite gap to Hamilton

The McLaren driver topped both sessions on Friday, finishing over seven tenths of a second ahead of Ferrari driver Raikkonen, third quickest.

But the world champion played down the significance of Friday's times, and admitted he was pleased with his day's work.

"Friday's results always need to be looked at with a degree of caution as you never know for certain what the other teams were doing and today is no exception to that rule," said Raikkonen.

"For our part, we tried to improve the set-up of the car compared to the point we had reached at the end of the test and we found, especially towards the end of the day, a few settings that could be interesting.

"So, I am reasonably pleased with how things went and I think that there is still room for improvement.

"The times of our main rivals? As I said at the start, there are too many question marks to be certain: what I can say is that we will be competitive, especially as right up until the final minutes, the times were all very similar."

Raikkonen finished right behind teammate Felipe Massa, who is confident Ferrari can match McLaren's pace during the weekend despite Hamilton's dominance today.

"All in all, it was a good day," Massa said. "We were always competitive, as were our main rivals. It won't be a stroll in the park, but we can take them on. We also worked on a wet track and I feel I can claim we will be on the pace in any conditions.

"There was not much difference, today at least, in pure performance terms between the hard and soft tyres but I think the latter will be a little bit quicker still and will definitely be the right choice for qualifying.

"Now we have to study our data to be in the best possible shape for both qualifying and the race."