How did I do that? says Ralf

They make a surprised pair because the world champion said he too was baffled by the size of his advantage, which was over half a second.

"After my first lap I went out with the expectation I should be able to do a (one minute) 16.8s, but then I saw the sector times and I was surprised," said Ralf. "The team asked me how I did it and I couldn't answer, basically.

"The car changed quite a bit from the morning to the afternoon. We had a few problems to get the tyre to work, made a few changes and they seemed to turn the car around - at least on my car.

"It was a pretty clean lap. You can always be one or two tenths quicker, but it was never going to be enough to beat this poor old gentlemen in the poor Ferrari which is five-tenths quicker than anyone else."

The younger Schumacher turned around a troubled weekend for the team as they struggled with the balance of the car.

"We had problems the whole weekend especially with tyres to get them to work," admitted the Williams driver. "We made a change before qualifying and that seemed to help us quite a bit. The temperature increased 10 degrees so the whole balance was a lot better and it was actually relatively easy to do the time.

"I guess we've got a lot of work to do to get the race set up right. But we have the right tyres and the weekend has shown that even if we were a bit off pace, we are consistent. So I am looking forward to race because we should be relatively competitive."