Practice 1 Report - Wurz lead the way for Williams

Alexander Wurz set the fastest time of the Friday morning session with a best lap of 1m34.946s, which was half a second faster than the fastest lap of the race in 2005, set by Kimi Raikkonen at 1m35.483s. This is an interesting result given the switch to V8 engines over the winter. The Williams driver was seven-tenths faster than the BMW of Robert Kubica.

As usual it was the test drivers doing the homework with Wurz, Kubica, Anthony Davidson, Robert Doornbos and Neel Jani all doing a lot of laps. Down at MF1 Racing there was a new face with Switzerland's Giorgio Mondini getting his first runs at a Grand Prix. Of the regular races, however, there were fast times in a short space of time from Juan Pablo Montoya, who was fourth fastest despite doing only four laps and Michael Schumacher, who also did four laps but set the sixth fastest time of the session. The one exception was Felipe Massa who did 18 laps, running in his new engine and doing some extra homework for Ferrari. David Coulthard was fifth fastest after seven laps. Massa was eighth, Doornbos ninth for Red Bull and Ralf Schumacher 10th for Toyota.

The only victim of the session was Tiago Monteiro who stopped out on the race track with a mechanical problem on his Midland-Toyota. Williams and Honda did not use their race drivers at all.