Sauber topped the timesheets at Jerez for the third successive day, as Jacques Villeneuve made the best of the worsening weather conditions.

The Canadian, aided by his team's new tyre partner, Michelin, was the only driver to lap the Spanish track in under 89 seconds.

"The weather we experienced the last three days was not what you wish for testing," admitted Giampaolo Dall'Ara, "but I believe we were still able to cope with it pretty well. Because of those bad conditions we couldn't run our programme as originally planned, but we moved our focus to more Michelin tyre work and in this way still learnt quite a lot.

"It also helped us to further gain knowledge of Jacques' driving style, and for him it was a valuable time to acclimatise to the car and the team. Jacques and Felipe covered altogether more than 950 kilometres and we didn't experience technical problems, which speaks for reliability and consistency. Overall I'm happy with what we've done."

This was the Swiss team's last test in 2004, Jacques and Felipe will next take to the track at Valencia on January 14.

Second and third quickest were the two Ferraris of Luca Badoer and Marc Gene. Both continued with the planned development programme of Bridgestone tyres and new components.

With Jarno Trulli still experiencing "eye problems", Ralf Schumacher was the Japanese outfit's sole representative once again. The German, who had a couple of moments both today and yesterday, completed 83 laps, posting the fourth fastest time of the day.

Giancarlo Fisichella and Franck Montagny were in action for Renault, the Italian continuing to acclimatise to Michelin wet rubber.

Alex Wurz was the quicker of the two McLaren drivers on duty, the Austrian outpacing teammate Pedro de la Rosa by almost a full second.

Having been near the top of the timesheets on Thursday, Christian Klien was in the middle-order today, though he still managed to outpace Vitantonio Liuzzi by more than 1.5s.

Takuma Sato was the quickest of four drivers on duty for BAR, the Japanese driver once again driving the 'concept car'. Youngster James Rossiter was impressive, finishing tenth quickest, just 0.3s slower than Sato, outpacing Bernoldi and Carroll.

"It's been a difficult three days in Jerez this week," admitted test team manager, Andrew Alsworth. "The ever-changing weather has caused constant disruption to our programme, however we have been able to get some useful data by running through a series of Michelin wet tyre evaluations. We are now hoping for much better conditions for next week's five-day test programme."

Robert Doornbos continued in the Jordan, the Dutch driver completing 78 laps on his way to posting a best time 5.1s off the pace. Doornbos, other than Gene and Badoer, was the only driver on Bridgestone rubber.

Tomorrow (Saturday), is the final day of test at Jerez this week.

Times