Albers upbeat after promising practice

Although the Dutchman struggled in the first session, he had a good afternoon's work and posted the 12th fastest time of the day.

That, added to Adrian Sutil's 10th quickest time, has left Albers optimistic of a strong performance in qualifying.

"We struggled this morning a little bit, testing different tyre compounds," said Albers. "I was having a hard time finding the right set-up, but the team did a great job over the lunch break to fine tune the car and get it ready for the second session.

"Bridgestone also gave us a great set of tyres, and I think we can make further gains tomorrow, because if you look at the times set by our third car and by my car, we can put together a solid race strategy.

"But it was the same thing heading into Saturday in Imola, so let's just hope we have some good luck in qualifying. But it's great to be there, in 12th place, ahead of Raikkonen.

"The nicest part is that we weren't playing any games with the fuel loads; we just did our jobs and came by some honest-to-goodness speed. It's nice for our fans, and hopefully we can go even a little bit quicker tomorrow and give them a good reason to be optimistic for the race."

His teammate Tiago Monteiro did not enjoy such a good day, the Portuguese claiming there was something wrong with his car.

He finished as 25th fastest, over 1.5 seconds behind Albers.

"Once again, we struggled a bit with our tyre choice," he said. "It's good to see that the car has potential - that's very positive, very motivating for the team. I just need to find out what we're doing wrong with the #18 car. There's something, obviously, that we're doing wrong, or maybe I'm doing wrong.

"There's something wrong with the set-up on my car somewhere, so we'll work hard with our engineers to find out what it is and hopefully be on the pace tomorrow."