Steady as she goes at McLaren

Raikkonen was in a good mood afterwards, particularly after beating DC through the beam - the only other man with the same equipment and, as near as can be, running order: "You haven't had a chance to see what everybody else is doing and there are no tyre tracks," said Raikkonen. "However we are close to the Ferraris so we will wait and see what happens tomorrow when it really counts."

"You can't really say a lot about the car's performance today due to the track conditions being as difficult as they were during both practice and qualifying," said Coulthard. "I did run wide at turn 10, so to end up fourth is not too bad taking into consideration that we are in the same starting group as our main competitors for tomorrow's qualifying."

McLaren boss Ron Dennis was a more guarded. "An interesting qualifying session which reflected the variable track conditions," he said. "We seem competitive if the conditions stay the same for tomorrow."