Monteiro upbeat about Midland form

The Midland driver put a new set of tyres to good use to set the 12th quickest time of the day, just 1.5 seconds off the pace.

"We've been working on the same set of tyres all morning and adapting the car to those old ones, and then later, when we switched to a new set, we weren't sure what would happen," said Monteiro.

"But I got a clear run at the track and the grip improved tremendously, which was a big surprise.

"In some places, there's still a lot more to come and I think we can squeeze some more speed out of those tyres. I'm really pleased with the job I've done with my engineers, because every time we had a problem we managed to sort it out and make good improvements.

"Now we have a day and a half to work on it. There's still more to gain, and the other teams are going to be working hard, as well, so we can't afford to sleep. We've got to work hard until Saturday morning to improve even more and get the race set-up right."

Teammate Christijan Albers had a difficult morning, struggling with the set-up of his car, and things did not get much better in the afternoon, when he was hit by a brake problems.

"We had a rough morning today, no question," admitted Albers, 14th fastest. "We played around with the car set-up but just couldn't find the right combination. But this afternoon, when we switched to the new tyre, it was a completely different car, so obviously that was the way to go.

"Looking at Tiago's times this morning after he switched, we saw that he was much better everywhere, so we suspected that it was the tyres but we still wanted to carry out a full evaluation.

"It's a shame that I had a brake pedal issue that we couldn't solve during the session, but I'm sure my mechanics will be able to fix it overnight. The important thing is that we found a lot more grip in the afternoon and I'm sure we'll be ready to hit back on Saturday."