Ralf optimistic of race pace

While Juan Pablo Montoya struggled to find a set-up and was hampered by the rain shower between the two sessions, Ralf Schumacher ended the day sixth fastest overall and optimistic of his chances.

"Before coming to Barcelona I said that we would only have a chance here if we had made the very best out of our package," said Schumacher, "and after the first free practice I can see we are on the right way. We could make our tyre choice quite quickly, and this was very important but still we need to improve on the set-up."

Montoya, who languished in 12th overall and was out of the top ten in both sessions, did not sure the German's enthusiasm: "We knew it would be difficult to find the right set-up for our car on this circuit and despite the fact that you cannot read too much into Friday's times, it's clear that there is still some work to do.

"Both the weather and consequently the track conditions changed from the first to the second Free Practice - and even during the same session - which made our job even harder. Anyway, we have completed our programme for today and we will now work in view of tomorrow's qualifying."

The team's chief operations engineer Sam Michael summed the team's progress up: "It was a good day on set-up work. We spent the morning's session testing two different set-ups to give us a direction for the race and we have verified some new aero parts for this grand prix. In the afternoon we did long runs on the two different Michelin compounds."