Raikkonen Refusing to Get Carried Away

Finland's Kimi Raikkonen has warned it is too early to make any predictions about McLaren's form for the Malaysian Grand Prix.

The Finn, who celebrated his first victory at Sepang a year ago, surprisingly topped the timesheets in afternoon free practice after Ferrari's six times champion Michael Schumacher had left everyone trailing in the morning.

Raikkonen's lap of 1:34.395 seconds was well inside the official circuit record of 1:36.412 and also faster than Schumacher's first session time of 1:34.437. His performance was just what McLaren needed after their worst start to the season in a decade.

The team scored just one point in the Australian season-opener, where Raikkonen suffered an engine failure and retired, and have not won a race since the Finn's Malaysian triumph.

The 'Iceman', runner up to Schumacher in a thrilling championship duel that went down to the wire last season, was 0.298 of a second quicker than Schumacher's younger brother Ralf in a Williams. Raikkonen, however, stayed cautious.

"A productive practice session, and of course it's pleasing to be fastest, but it's still early days," said Raikkonen. "We went through our tyre evaluation programme, and the car feels good and is handling well, but we will see what happens tomorrow.

"It's definitely too early to say how much we have improved since Melbourne, but I'm looking forward to the rest of the weekend."

Teammate David Coulthard was ninth quickest almost a second behind Raikkonen.

"A reasonable practice today showing that we are in better shape than a few weeks ago," said the Scot. "I had a small problem which caused me to struggle with the accelerator pedal, so I was unable to go for fast times. However, where we really are performance wise we will only find out tomorrow and Sunday."