The opening 15 minutes of the session would see a lot of spins and off track moments for numerous drivers including the five times world champion. Turns 2 and 12 seem to be causing the drivers most of the problems as Villeneuve, Trulli, Montoya, Yoong and Coulthard all suffer early on in the session. No improvement on times so far for the Ferrari’s but the gap behind is getting lower as the McLaren’s begin to improve on their best times, getting inside 1 second of the fastest lap set this morning by Rubens Barrichello.

30 minutes into the session and both Schumacher and Barrichello are lapping once more, but yet again no real improvements from either driver although Michael laps faster than Rubens in comparison to this sessions best times. Schumacher brings himself to 0.019 seconds of the fastest lap set by Barrichello. Rubens is looking a bit more comfortable with his chassis in this session. Schumacher continues to edge closer to Barrichello and is now only 0.011 seconds behind but its back to the pits for both Ferrari’s and some more changes to the chassis.

6 minutes to go in the session and Schumacher is back on track and he takes the new fastest lap with a 1.16.086 Michael really improved in sector 1 and was pretty much on the ragged edge for the remainder of the lap in order to beat Barrichello’s time. Closing moments of the session would see no changes as yellow flags appear for Massa losing part of his front wing thanks to Fisichella blowing his Honda engine dumping oil all over the track.

So a good Friday for Ferrari with plenty of laps done between both drivers 45 for Michael and 49 for Rubens and lots of tyre and set-up data to look over and ponder tonight in the pits. McLaren were the closest to Ferrari and on the day they announced their 2003 driver line-up then its not really surprising to see them up the front!

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