On the penultimate day of testing before the teams head off to Melbourne for the first round of the 2008 Formula One World Championship, McLaren continued to set the pace, with Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen topping the timesheets.

Today's session was entirely dry, with no damp track in the morning, and the sun frequently popping out from behind the clouds, allowing the ten teams on duty to get down to some real work.

The Woking outfit concentrated on pit stop practices and qualifying simulations in the morning, moving the focus to longer runs in the afternoon: the plan being to assess different fuel loads and the various set-ups these require. Both drivers stopped out on track in the morning, within seventeen minutes of one another, as a result of fuel coupling issues, which the team managed to quickly resolve without any impact on the days' planned programme.

Third quickest was Kimi Raikkonen, who was joined by his teammate, Felipe Massa. Both drivers worked on the development of the F2008 and on preparations for the start of the season, with the Brazilian also completing successfully a race simulation. The Finn stopped on track shortly before lunch having encountered an unspecified technical problem which was soon rectified.

Splitting the Maranello cars was Nico Rosberg as Williams continues to impress. "Nico once again concentrated on set-up work all day today ready for Australia," said Test Team Manager, Dickie Stanford. "Kazuki Nakajima, in the second FW30, also did some set-up work in the morning followed by a race run which he successfully completed in the afternoon."

Another team which appears to be making progress is Force India, with Giancarlo Fisichella finishing sixth on the timesheets, and test driver Tonio Liuzzi finishing tenth. The Italian duo both had encouraging days, completing set-up work in the morning and race and qualifying simulations in the afternoon. Both programmes went without major problems with the drivers completing 191 laps in total.

"It was a good day," said Fisichella. "We did over 100 laps and worked through all the schedule. I was struggling with the front locking at first, but then we understood what the problem was and made a change so the car was back to normal and at the end I was comfortable and confident and able to improve my lap times. I am happy with the new package, it is better with more downforce and has more stability, but we have still got something more for the first race so it looks quite encouraging."

"Today was a much better test," added Liuzzi, "and we achieved a lot of kilometres and had no issues with the car. It seems to be getting better and better as we felt yesterday. We seem to have made a step forward from last year's car and now we are tuning the little details. We did some long runs and short runs for both qualifying and race simulations and were pretty happy. We still have some work to do, but we are for sure going in a good direction. The engineers did a great job - it was a tough programme between myself and Giancarlo but we both had no issues reliability wise and were very competitive over the day."

"Again a very productive day of testing," said Mike Gascoyne. "We had no major reliability issues and despite the numerous red flags, we were able to work through the whole programme, with both drivers doing set up work in the morning and then race distances in the afternoon with pit stop practice. That went very well on both cars, so it was overall a good day. Thanks very much to Tonio for his two days of testing, we have definitely made progress with the new package and are very pleased so far.'