As was the case on Friday the drivers would have to cope with the demands of the single lap qualifying format. After his run Juan Pablo would hold on to the pole position but once the Ferrari's took to the track he would see his time easily beaten.

But in the post qualifying interviews Juan Pablo seemed happy with his performance, even though he did admit that the new FW25 still needed a lot of work. Juan Pablo said: "The car was alright. We had a few scares in the warm-up where the car felt very different. We changed a few things and made it better.

"It was pretty good and the guys in the team did a fantastic job. It’s pretty interesting and it should be a good race tomorrow as the car is very consistent."

For Ralf this qualifying would be his chance to make amends for his poor performance in Friday qualifying. After what appeared to be a fairly tidy lap he would set a best time of 1m28.830 to take provisional pole, but his time there would be short.

As for what race strategy the WilliamsF1 team was running their cars under during qualifying is very much an unknown factor and could possibly go someway to explain Ralf's poor performance during qualifying if his car was running a heavier load than Juan Pablo's. One surprising thing to note was that the FW25 was not the fastest car during this qualifying session, which may indicate that they were carrying a heavier load.

As for the team that dominated qualifying, well again it was the Ferrari pair of Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello who qualified first and second.

The first driver to take to the track was Minardi's Justin Wilson but he would surprise everyone by by pulling into the pit lane before he completed his flying lap. It was explained later that the team knew they would qualify last so did not want to put any additional demands on the car.

But it would seem that by failing to qualify the car, then the Minardi team are not required to give the car to parc ferme and can continue to work on the car all night. Team-mate Jos Verstappen would also not complete his flying lap.

"It was a deliberate strategy on our part," said Minardi team spokesman Graham Jones. "We did it to avoid going into the parc ferme and to be able to continue to work on our cars. Of course, we know we should start from the back of the grid, but we can do what we want."

In fourth would be Sauber's Heinz Harald Frentzen who would set a time that would end up been 0.6sec behind Montoya after the completion of qualifying. Sauber team-mate Heidfeld would finish in seventh.

In fifth and sixth came Toyota's Oliver Panis followed by BAR's Jacques Villeneuve. making up the top ten was BAR team-mate Jenson Button in eighth ahead of Ralf with Renault's Fernando Alonso in tenth. The young Spaniard would have a major moment in the mid-sector chicane but managed to catch the car and complete the lap.

The one team that was expected to challenge Ferrari but failed during this qualifying was McLaren. David Coulthard was out of shape on his lap, the Scot, looking quite heavy on fuel went into seventh. Kimi Raikkonen took to the track next in the spare McLaren Mercedes after crashing his race car in the morning practice. He would push very hard and he would go off the circuit and with his lap ruined he would finish in fourteenth.

Now the question as to what race strategy, and resulting qualifying setup, will only be answered come the start of the 2003 Australian Grand Prix on Sunday.