Kimi furious at wing failure

The McLaren ace was hot on the heels of Ferrari's Schmacher when his rear wing flew off the car at 190mph as he was heading down the start-finish straight. The loss of downforce forced him into the barriers at Turn 1 and left the Finn fuming.

"I was challenging Michael big time and I was in a strong position so it's a shame," he said. "All of a sudden I just lost downforce and then I was a passenger. It's never nice not to finish a race, but at least we know that the pace is there."

Team boss Ron Dennis sympathised with the youngster but still drew a positive out of the weekend.

"I have spoken to him," he said. "He is part out of our racing team and his disappointment is no greater than ours. He appreciates how everyone is trying and I don't think anyone other than us had the opportunity to beat Michael. As it was a manufacturing mistake rather than a design problem there was no danger of the same thing happening to David."

Team-mate David Coulthard was not told about Raikkonen's wing failure and so was not worried about the same thing happening to his car.

"I didn't know Kimi had a rear-wing failure," he said, "no-one told me so you can't worry about something you don't know about!"

But the Scot was not satisfied with his fourth spot in the race despite it being his best result of the season so far.

"I wish I could say I was [pleased with the race] but I'm not," he said. "I picked up some damage when Rubens hit me at the hairpin which broke the rear wing endplate and I picked up more damage when I hit the debris from Kimi. The engineers worked quite hard to adjust the car in the pitstops to dial-out the understeer the car had."

Coulthard had been looking forward to an on-track battle with friend Jenson Button (BAR-Honda), but it failed to materialise.

"I really wanted to get a result here today and battle to race, I was looking forward to a race with Jenson but unfortunately he got past in the pits so it didn't happen."