Williams looking good for final qualifying

With this following on from Ralf and Juan topping the time sheets in Friday morning practice, the British team is pleased with its progress at this the first grand prix of the European season.

"I'm quite happy with the outcome of my first qualifying," reported Ralf after lapping third fastest in 1m21.193s. "We've made progress, especially on the mechanical side. It was clear that I had some oversteer in a couple of corners which might have cost about two or three tenths of a second, but I'm confident that we will be able to sort this out for tomorrow."

Team-mate Juan Pablo lapped in 1m21.490s and also reckoned that he could have lapped faster, saying: "Coming out of the second Rivazza, I went on the power and had some oversteer so I had to get off the throttle and lost a little bit of time."

Chief Operations Engineer Sam Michael was quietly pleased with the advances made: "We've introduced a couple of aerodynamic components for this race and it's good to see that the chassis works well with these changes."