Raikkonen happy despite no front row

The Ferrari driver, tipped as one of the favourites for victory this weekend, had to settle for third place behind McLaren's Heikki Kovalainen and Red Bull's Mark Webber.

Raikkonen, however, still managed to beat championship contenders Lewis Hamilton, Felipe Massa, and Robert Kubica, fourth, ninth and 10th respectively.

And the world champion reckons it's still too early to judge how strong Kovalainen and Webber will be tomorrow.

"Comparing to yesterday it has been much better," said Raikkonen. "Yesterday was really difficult so we put quite a lot of effort to try and sort my car out, and it seems to have worked okay.

"We are not exactly where we want to be, but nobody knows how much fuel everyone is running. Tomorrow we will only know how fast we were today.

"It was pretty good today. I was happy with the car. The last run in Q3 was quite difficult but the second one was much better. P3 is still okay if you look where the other are in terms of who is ahead of me in the championship."

Raikkonen said he felt much happier with the car than yesterday and is confident he has a good set-up for the race.

"From the test the car was good and yesterday was difficult for some reason. We changed the car a bit today. In last qualifying there was a lot of wind and it made it tricky in some places.

"You can expect that, sometimes it hurts you more, and if you can get it right in those moments it can pay off. I am happy with car and in race we should have a pretty good car."