Ferrari took control of the time sheets during Friday free practice in Spain, with Michael Schumacher going fastest and staying top with his first timed lap. Rubens Barrichello was second in session one, but dropped to fourth in the afternoon.

The pair had remained in their pits for nearly half of the morning practice before nonchalantly taking to the track and going quickest straight away - first of all it was Barrichello who went to the top of the time sheets and he was quickly followed by his team mate. Only Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Jenson Button could beat the Brazilian, leaving the team confident for tomorrow.

Schumacher's fastest time was 1.20.380 after 45 laps. "At the moment, all I can say is that it seems quite good, even if we cannot be sure of what programme our opponents were running," he said in a team press release.

"The tyres seem well suited to the track and offer a consistent level of performance. On top of that, first impressions confirm the findings we made at our test sessions here over the past few weeks. All in all, we can be reasonably confident about tomorrow's qualifying.

Barrichello managed a 1.20.742 over 42 laps. "Today went well, especially in terms of the tyre comparison work we did," he commented. "The weather conditions are different to those we experienced when we tested here a few weeks ago, as it is much hotter. I am not yet completely happy with the set-up we have come up with for my car, but we have plenty of time to improve and to be ready for qualifying and for Sunday's race."

Technical director Ross Brawn agreed with his drivers analysis of the day. "It was a good day and the Bridgestone tyres seem to be working very well here compared with the others, and I hope that holds up for the weekend," the Englishman declared. "We got through our entire planned programme today without any particular problems.

"As usual it is difficult to tell what the true performance level of our competitors is on a Friday, but you can see that there are more Bridgestone runners near the front. Even though we test here a lot, we still did a lot of laps as there is no such thing as the perfect set-up and you can always improve, or try new ideas you come up with at the factory, plus the track conditions change."

Sporting director Jean Todt was also optimistic for Saturday. "It was the usual Friday programme, which saw us doing a lot of work with Sunday's race in mind. In particular, we concentrated on running a comparison test of the two types of tyre available. We can say that the first impression is the situation seems promising and that Bridgestone has done a good job. I expect to see the usual fight for the front row positions in tomorrow's qualifying session and we can tackle it with a degree of optimism," he added.