Schuey plays down advantage

Schumacher's best 1m20.084s lap time, set in the first hour long session, was some 1.5s faster than his team-mate and 2s quicker than anybody else. Although the German was only third quickest in the second session, his earlier mark kept him 0.9s clear of the field overall. Barrichello however, ended the day fourth, behind Jenson Button and Takuma Sato in the BARs, after set-up problems.

As usual, Schumacher was keen to play down his apparent advantage: "We had an interesting day. We were very quick in the morning and a little bit slower in the afternoon.

"We had a clear picture of what set-up we required having tested at this track in the winter, but our competitors have picked up their pace during the course of the day and I think the rest of the weekend will also be interesting. I think we can fight for the win on Sunday, but it will not be an easy task."

The team's technical director Ross Brawn summed up the team's day: "One of our main tasks today was evaluating the two types of tyre available to us and we have gathered enough data to make a choice. We were able to do very long runs to simulate tyre behaviour in the race.

"We also worked on the brakes which get a hard time at this track. Michael was reasonably happy with the set-up on his car, but one could say that Rubens was less so. Now we have to work on optimising our package for qualifying and the race."