Williams pairing upbeat

Montoya was limited to only three laps in the first session after a gearbox problem forced the unit to be changed, but his was happy with progress thereafter.

"I am quite confident we can improve our performance as there is still more to come from the car, " said Montoya. "On Friday it is difficult to judge where everybody really is so I would not look too much at the lap time. The balance of my car is not the best but we can fix it for tomorrow."

Schumacher was happier with his car, but emphasised that more work was needed to realise its full potential at Spa. "I think there is still room for improvement on the setup side, " he said. "We have a couple of things to sort out before we can make our final tyre choice. "

BMW Motorsport director Gerhard Berger was also upbeat about their chances. "Juan had some gearbox problems that we could fix and we concentrated on our setup programme and are reasonably happy with the outcome, " he said. "It is going to be hard to challenge Ferrari here in Spa, but we should be able to get close to them. "