Coulthard admits to poor qualifying performance

"I have under-performed this afternoon, there is more speed in the car," said Coulthard, who was over 0.6 seconds slower than the man 12 points ahead of him in the championship, Michael Schumacher. "I was not able to explore the merits of the car.

"It was just one of those sessions where you just could not quite click into it, so under the circumstances we will have to be pretty happy and see what the race brings us."

Coulthard might have been back in fourth spot, but he benefited from Nick Heidfeld's late crash in the Sauber, which forced race stewards to red flag the session with less than two minutes left.

The Monaco-based racer ensured he would get the chance of another flying lap in his MP4-16, after darting down the inside of Rubens Barrichello at the exit of the pitlane, and came close to knocking over one of the Ferrari mechanics.

Barrichello, forced into the spare car after an earlier crash which brought about the first halt to the action, had been told to move further up by his mechanics, but as he attempted to do so the lights turned to green and DC took his chance.

Coulthard insisted he was not going to hang about to discover if anything was wrong with the Ferrari realising he had to be first car on the road to stand any chance of getting in a decent final qualifying lap.

"I don't think anything like that has happened before with just a minute-and-a-half to go," he said. "Obviously I had to get a quick out-lap as it was clear that not every car would be able to do a flier.

"I am not quite sure what happened with the Ferrari, but you are not allowed to work on your car or stop your car in the pitlane. I don't know whether he (Rubens) went there and stalled or whether they wanted to work on it, but obviously it caused a bit of confusion and I just had to get out and try and improve on the lap.

"I knew it had been really messy up until then and I am still not entirely satisfied with the run I've done, as I don't think we got the maximum out of the car. We will find out in the race just how quick we are, but I am disappointed not to be on the front row. However the others could have brakes issues in the race which we won't."

The McLaren driver confirmed again he was "99.9 per cent certain" that the launch control system would work for the start of the race after two recent failures.