Raikkonen fastest at Barcelona

The Ferrari driver, who is joint leader of the world championship with Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, was six tenths of a second faster than Takuma Sato in the Super Aguri.

Sato was one of the surprises of the day, with his team trying out new aero parts and, perhaps most significantly, a new gearbox upgrade from Honda on the SA07 that should be introduced for the Spanish Grand Prix.

The Japanese driver completed his fastest run of the day in qualifying trim.

McLaren caused one of the biggest stirs of the day when they began evaluation of a new radical front wing that featured a high plane element over the top of the nose.

The team ran the MP4-22 with and without the new design to evaluate its effectiveness, as Pedro de la Rosa set the third fastest time.

Sources have suggested that the team were impressed with the new wing during straightline testing with it in Menorca last week and, although preliminary impressions were good in Barcelona today, further work will be conducted on it for the remainder of the week.

"We did some work on the aerodynamics, continuing the work from Menorca and there is a small improvement," de la Rosa told autosport.com. "Fernando will try other aero stuff to see how things are tomorrow. It was a satisfactory day. It is a small improvement and every bit counts."

Ralf Schumacher was fourth for Toyota, while Nick Heidfeld continued BMW Sauber's strong early season momentum with the fifth quickest time. Rubens Barrichello showed slightly improved form for Honda Racing to set the sixth fastest lap.

Seventh fastest Nelson Piquet Junior evaluated some new aerodynamic updates for Renault as the team continue to work on overcoming the problems that have blighted the start to their campaign.

Spaniard Adrian Valles returned to action for Spyker, but his day ended with a crash at Turn 5. He impacted with the tyre barriers and caused some damage, but the monocoque is believed to be okay.

Valles was not the only driver in the wars, with Kazuki Nakajima escaping unhurt from a fairly sizeable crash in the afternoon.

The Williams test driver had caused the first red flag of the day at 9:30am when he stopped with a technical problem, but at 2:30pm he went off at the 210km/h Curva Campsa and clouted the tyre barriers.

The impact badly damaged the right hand side of the car, requiring the team to fly in new parts for tomorrow's running and forcing them to cancel plans to get Nico Rosberg out later in the day.

Today's times:

Pos  Driver         Team                      Time      Laps
 1.  Raikkonen      Ferrari              (B)  1:21.195   98
 2.  Sato           Super Aguri-Honda    (B)  1:21.858   99
 3.  de la Rosa     McLaren-Mercedes     (B)  1:21.906  101
 4.  R.Schumacher   Toyota               (B)  1:21.983   92
 5.  Heidfeld       BMW-Sauber           (B)  1:22.114   74
 6.  Barrichello    Honda                (B)  1:22.665  132
 7.  Piquet         Renault              (B)  1:22.763  125
 8.  Liuzzi         Toro Rosso-Ferrari   (B)  1:22.771   56
 9.  Coulthard      Red Bull-Renault     (B)  1:23.165   47
10.  Valles         Spyker-Ferrari       (B)  1:23.343   44
11.  van der Garde  Spyker-Ferrari       (B)  1:23.466   37
12.  Nakajima       Williams-Toyota      (B)  1:24.248   43

All Timing Unofficial