Sergio Perez, who topped the timesheets on Tuesday but subsequently had his time disallowed for cutting a chicane, made no such mistakes today, posting the best time seen at the Circuit de Catalunya so far this year.

Conditions were ideal with bright sunshine throughout the day, though the air temperature never got any higher than 18 degrees C and the track temperature peaked at 27 degrees.

The Swiss team had a full programme planned for its Mexican rookie, with set up work in the morning followed by a qualifying simulation before the lunch break and a race simulation in the afternoon.

However, while the qualifying simulation - the first ever for the C30 and the Mexican driver first one for the F1 rookie driver - went well, the race simulation was interrupted after only six laps due to a powertrain problem and resumed about an hour later.

"We have had an interesting day," said James Key, the team's technical director, "as we carried out qualifying practice and race simulation. In the morning we started off with some general set up work, and then went into a qualifying practice, which was the first time we had run the car on low fuel. This was also the first time for Sergio to go through all those procedures from Q1 to Q3. He did a good and controlled set of laps, setting a time of 1:22.042 minutes on soft tyres and 1:21.761 on the super soft compound.

"In the afternoon we started a race simulation," he continued, "but unfortunately this was stopped early due to a KERS problem, which meant we could not complete the laps we wanted."

"We did a lot of useful preparation work for the first race weekend," added Perez. "Although we could not complete the race simulation because of a technical problem, for me it was an interesting and positive programme. It was my last day of testing. I feel ready and I can't wait to race!"

On his final day of testing prior to the start of the season, Felipe Massa tackled a busy programme, focussing mainly on a comparison of various aerodynamic elements, before moving on to a simulation of a race weekend.

"These two days of testing were very important and the outcome is good," said the Brazilian. "We introduced a lot of new components on the 150° Italia and their effect was clear to see: there's more downforce and therefore, even the tyres were working better, even if their level of degradation is still significant. Today, we did a race simulation and the car also worked well in this situation. I don't know where we are compared to the others because we just concentrated on ourselves."

After seven days of testing, Massa tried to predict what sort of scenario might begin to emerge in Melbourne: "I think that qualifying will still be important, but the race will be very different to last year. I expect a lot of pit stops, as can be seen from the fact that today I did four and it will be important to manage the tyres very carefully, even in qualifying. Strategy will become even more important, that's for sure. I myself feel more confident, because to have more grip on the first flying lap is vital for me and I think that my style of driving is well suited to these tyres, whereas last year I struggled a lot because the tyres, especially the fronts, were very hard."

Mark Webber completed his preparations for the season-opening Grand Prix in Melbourne with another trouble-free outing. The Australian completed 97 laps on his way to posting the third best time of the day, albeit 0.705s off Perez' pace.

"We had a good day again," he said. "The car was reliable, so hopefully the weather will stay dry tomorrow and then rain on Saturday, so we get a good week out of it!

"I feel I'm ready for the first race now and while, of course you want a good run at your home race, I don't want to jinx with it any forecasts," he added. "In terms of team preparation, it's the best we've ever had going into the first part of a season in terms of reliability. All the departments have done a sensational job in getting every aspect ready. Hopefully, we're not too far from our main rivals to start with and we'll just go from there."

"It's been a good week so far, with no major difficulties," added the team's head of race engineering, Ian Morgan. "The weather helped us out a bit as well. With track temperatures near 30 degrees, it was nice to finally get a bit of running in the kind of conditions we may see at some European races. All in all, a successful day and I think Mark's now pretty comfortable with everything. He has a good feel for the car and how the tyres work, which is more important than ever this season.

"Tomorrow, it will be Seb's turn to complete his pre-season work. We'll run through a similar programme to today and, as with Mark, try to get him as comfortable as possible with everything before we pack up for Australia."