Ross Brawn was not sure as to the cause of the incident for Rubens as they had not made any changes to his set-up, but noted that Michael also suffered at the same corner although he did not hit the wall. Brawn is happy so far with the way the car is developing but is also cautious about the every improving track conditions, which are making set-up tweaks hard to assess. But as the yellow flags came out for the Barrichello spin, Schumacher was on a really quick lap that was predicted to be ½ a second faster than his previous best!

“No real changes to his car, I will have to speak to him and find out what happened, its quite a tricky corner with its camber and shape, it caught Michael out the lap before so its not an easy place,” said Ross. “The track is picking up grip very quickly so its difficult to judge how well out changes are working as we don’t know if it is the car improving or the track, but we are in good shape.

Michael Schumacher is out early in the session and once more he is testing the limits of his car as this time he runs wide coming into the stadium section, but continues round with no problems but he is not out for long before he is back into his garage with no time improvement so far. Schumacher’s mechanics are hard at work in removing gravel, mud and grass from the F2002 sidepods after his trip across the green stuff at high speed. 15 minutes into the session and still no appearance from Rubens Barrichello.

20 minutes to go and Schumacher is once again back out on track and he has no incidents this time and sets a new fastest lap seen on this track and is the first to go into the 14’s with a blinding lap of 1 minute 14.686 seconds. Schumacher continues to lap showing that his pace is not simply down to a low fuel load but with 15 minutes to go there has still been no appearance by Barrichello! Ralf Schumacher pops into second place and finally somebody has spilt the Ferrari 1-2 at the top of the timesheets.

With 10 minutes to go Michael is once again on track after watching the Williams duo go for a couple of qualifying runs on light fuel and new tyres the German was out to improve his time some more. And he is doing just that as he improves in sectors 1 and 2 and sets a new personal best in the third sector and takes the line with a 1.14.487. It does not look like Barrichello will do any running in this final session as his car is still be heavily worked on and is in pieces in the garage. Rubens however does not look too concerned by this as he chats with his mechanics as they work on his chassis.

Closing moments of the session saw Schumacher once again out on track and once again but this time he did not improve thanks to traffic getting in his way. So Ferrari are looking very strong for a great qualifying position and hopefully they will firmly secure the front row and make it all red, and stop the Montoya pole streak.

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