Hakkinen hits trouble in practice

The Finn ploughed off the track after a handful of laps in Friday's second 90-minute test session, having struggled to 17th position in the opening period.

After identifying a brake problem with his Mercedes C-class, Hakkinen rejoined for the last few minutes and produced a 1:20.919 lap, enough for third overall behind teammates Jamie Green and Bruno Spengler, but ahead of series leader Bernd Schneider.

"I had a situation where I went wide onto the grass (at the penultimate corner) so I kept going straight on into the pits," he told autosport.com.

"I asked them to check the car, and they found a problem with the brakes.

"They had to change a lot of parts, so I lost a lot of track time, so there was only 15 minutes or so left at the end of the session when I got back out.

"Before that, the lap time was just not there for me. Bruno was behind me and catching like mad, even thought I was going flat-out! Then we found the problem with the brakes, but I don't think that's what caused me to go off.

"When I rejoined the session, I quickly got my lap time to where I wanted it to be, so I was reasonably happy. Nevertheless there are still a lot of study and understand. (Teammates) Bernd, Jamie and Bruno all had good qualities in certain areas, so I tried to pick the good things out of the data to put them together and then make it happen on Saturday (in qualifying)."