Montoya won't back down

"The first few laps could be very exciting," said Head. "I think anybody who tells Juan to try and be cautious is talking to a stone wall. He wants to win, so I don't think he will be giving any quarter to Michael. But he knows he has to finish in order to get the result.

"The start of the race will be interesting. I hope that it is clean and that we have both our cars in the race at the end of the first lap."

Montoya was upbeat and chirpy to be on the front row, despite the margin of over half a second to Schumacher. The recent needle between Montoya and Schumacher arises from their incident on the first lap of the last race at Imola.

"We'll have to see what happens when we get down to the corner, don't you think?" Montoya asked Schumacher in the post-qualifying press conference, without getting an immediate response.

"We had an interesting fight in Imola," said the Ferrari man a little later. "But for me that doesn't carry over to this week. We'll find out if we have another battle tomorrow. It's part of racing and I have no problem with that."

"We had far too much oversteer in qualifying today," continued Montoya. "But I have to say I am happy. I think we have a good race car....we will have to see what happens. It will be a long race tomorrow, but we will hopefully see some good racing action. It's important for the team's motivation that we've got this result today."