Head scratching was on the agenda in many garages in the Hungaroring pit-lane today. Unusual weather, with a short sharp burst of rain hitting the track for just a few minutes certainly caused some problems, but generally many drivers seemed to have difficulty assessing their performance on a track that is always dirty on a Friday, with tyres whose overall behaviour was tricky to assess. The Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro drivers completed a total of 97 laps between them, 47 for Felipe Massa and 50 for Kimi Raikkonen. At the end of 90 minutes of practice, the Finn ended up sixth fastest with the Brazilian right behind him.

The lap times at this tight and twisty circuit are always very close and today was no exception with under a second between first, Fernando Alonso for McLaren-Mercedes and eleventh, Ralf Schumacher for Toyota. Behind the Spanish World Champion, the only man under the 1'21" mark came Heikki Kovalainen in the Renault and series leader Lewis Hamilton in the second McLaren. Nico Rosberg was fourth fastest for Williams-Toyota, while Nick Heidfeld in the BMW-Sauber was just seven hundredths faster than Raikkonen.

Two new, but actually not so new names on the time sheet: joining Scuderia Toro Rosso where he has replaced Scott Speed, is Germany's Sebastian Vettel, who stood in for Robert Kubica in the United States GP, picking up a point for eighth place. In the Spyker camp, after Winkelhock had a one-off drive at the Nürburgring, his place has now been taken by Japan's Sakon Yamamoto.

Kimi Raikkonen: "I am not very happy with the handling of my car in these two sessions and obviously we have a lot to do in order to improve. But this is only Friday and there is no point in making a drama out of it as far as qualifying and the race are concerned. I wasn't able to get a really clear picture of the performance of the two types of tyre, especially on the first lap, firstly because of traffic and secondly because of that quick short shower."
 

Felipe Massa: "Overall, I am happy with the day. In the final series of laps I could have done a good time but there was a yellow flag and I had to slow. It's hard to say at this stage of the weekend if we are faster or slower than our closest rivals, but we are definitely competitive. We worked a lot on the set-up and towards the end of the day we found some good solutions. There is still a slight unknown as far as tyre performance is concerned, especially on the softer ones over a long run, while the harder ones however are more consistent."

Luca Baldisserri: "The way these three hours of free practice went revealed a slight difficulty on our part when it came to finding the right balance for the car, especially on Kimi's. We picked up a lot of data and we will have to analyse it very carefully to improve the situation for qualifying and the race. On top of this comes uncertainty over the weather and the influence that could have in terms of set-up, especially for qualifying which is so important. Therefore, it is easy to see why it is really difficult to make predictions for the rest of the weekend. The handling of the two types of tyre we have available is rather unusual so far: we have a big difference in terms of consistency of performance, while on the first lap the results are very similar."

Free Practice - First session: F. Massa: 2nd 1.22.519 18 laps chassis 260; K. Raikkonen: 3rd 1.22.540 21 laps chassis 262; Weather: air temperature 27/28 °C, track temperature 35/38°C, clear skies; Free Practice - Second session: K. Raikkonen: 6th 1.21.589 29 laps chassis 262; F. Massa: 7th 1.21.620 29 laps chassis 260; Weather: air 30/28 °C, track 40/39 °C, variable, brief rain shower.