Toyota's team manager happy with test

Allan McNish ended the day fifth quickest in the new TF102 chassis, although his time was set early on in the dry and track conditions failed to dry completely during the rest of the day after a prolonged rain shower.

"It's very good that we've now had our first official test as a Formula 1 team," Pasquali told AUTOSPORT. "It makes us realise that Melbourne's now getting very close and psychologically for the team that's very good. It's also quite strange after all the tests we've done alone that people are now watching us.

"I'm very pleased with how the first day went. I actually think it was quite good that it started to rain because it shows that our team has got proper reaction time to deal with situations like you get in real racing."

Although Pasquali believes McNish would have gone quicker given more dry running, he paid tribute to his team for getting the Scot out on track before the rains fell.

"It was a good morale boost and although other cars would probably have gone quicker had it stayed dry all day, I think it was quite important that we were ready to go when testing started at 9am. If we had started any later things we would only have run in the wet and things would have been very different. I've got a really good feeling about how things went today," he said.