Valencia 4: Schuey's warning

The German, using last year's F2004, made good use of Bridgestone's preliminary selection for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix to edge out Jenson Button's BAR by three tenths of a second. His Ferrari team-mate Rubens Barrichello was third quickest overall in the Ferrari F2004M, despite suffering an afternoon engine failure.

Button's run to the second spot was encouraging for the Brackley-based team, which had earlier seen Enrique Bernoldi suffer a major engine blow-up in the morning and Button himself suffer gearbox problems that prevented him from conducting long distance running. Instead he switched his focus to 10-lap runs for set-up evaluation.

Heidfeld's fourth fastest time gave Williams some cause for optimism, after spending the day focusing on compound tests for Michelin. Team-mate Mark Webber was sixth fastest after working on set-up to try and overcome the rear instability problems that have dogged the FW27 since its launch earlier this week.

Behind Heidfeld, Jarno Trulli continued to show slightly improved form for Toyota, despite being forced to stop out on the track at one point with an hydraulics pump failure. It was the same glitch that had affected him on Thursday.

Ralf Schumacher claimed that the week's testing had been encouraging for Toyota, after a far from convincing performance so far from the TF105.

"Looking at the last two tests we look slightly better than we expected," he said. "Here at Valencia most of the cars were generally putting in times within about half a second of each other.

"So we're pleased with what we've seen so far and we appear to be pretty competitive. But exactly how competitive we'll only find out in Melbourne when everyone brings what they think is the best package they have."

Test driver Ricardo Zonta only completed 13 laps because he was conducting a shakedown of the Toyota TF104B prior to wet weather tyre testing over the weekend.



Michael Schumacher (Ferrari*), 1m10.209s, 121 laps
Jenson Button (BAR), 1m10.559s, 110 laps
Rubens Barrichello (Ferrari*), 1m10.681, 100 laps
Nick Heidfeld (Williams), 1m10.748s, 90 laps
Jarno Trulli (Toyota), 1m10.814s, 100 laps
Mark Webber (Williams), 1m11.049s, 89 laps
Ralf Schumacher (Toyota), 1m11.635s, 88 laps
Ricardo Zonta (Toyota*), 1m11.841s, 13 laps
Enrique Bernoldi, 1m12.298s, 70 laps
Adam Carroll (BAR*), 1m12.588s, 24 laps
Alan Van der Merwe (BAR*), 1m13.117s, 53 laps

* denotes 2004 car