Ferrari confident over tyres

Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn said: "It's going to be a weekend for tyres. The track temperature was very hot today (43-46C in the afternoon) and we've got a picture of which tyre we want to run. It's a question of whether we choose the fastest tyre or the more consistent tyre, so we have to look at all the data and check it through. Pleasingly though, we are competitive in the hot conditions and it shouldn't get any hotter than this all weekend."

Ferrari had a positive test with two new Bridgestone compounds last week and have selected those two tyres for Hockenheim. Jordan has similar tyres available while Sauber has apparently elected not to run them.

Schumacher's quickest time of the day was only 0.04s faster than Kimi Raikkonen's McLaren best. The track was initially very 'green' with a lot of the Michelin runners in particular suffering some graining, but this disappeared as the track rubbered in. McLaren and Williams both lapped within 0.16s of the Ferrari best with BAR and Renault a little further back.

"This is a difficult race to call," Michelin's Pierre Dupasquier said. "The track was very abrasive first thing this morning and that might be the case again tomorrow because the prospects of rain are rated at better than 90 percent, so the surface is likely to get a thorough cleansing overnight. It is much harder to predict how the track might evolve when the weather conditions are unstable."