06/09/2008 14:23

The BMW Sauber driver produced a late surge of speed to clock a best time of one minute and 47.876 seconds.

This lifted him clear of the two McLaren Mercedes cars, with Finn Heikki Kovalainen three-tenths of a second adrift in second place ahead of championship leading Briton Lewis Hamilton who was fourth.

Two-time world champion Spaniard Fernando Alonso was third for Renault and Brazilian Felipe Massa fifth for Ferrari. Defending champion Kimi Raikkonen o Finland in the second Ferrari was seventh behind sixth-placed German tyro Sebastian Vettel in a Toro Rosso.

The entire morning was overshadowed by drizzle, showers and then heavy rain as the weather took control of proceedings and reduced the action to a series of dashes out followed by quick returns to the dry of the pits.

All the teams except for the top three - Ferrari, McLaren and BMW - chose to use the session for wet weather testing.

As a result, and with the rain falling on different parts of the track at different times, the time-boards threw up a series of different fastest drivers as a variety of unexpected names stood top of the timings.

Only in the final ten minutes did any meaningful timed running take place when Hamilton went top by a clear 1.3 seconds before he slid wildly at Les Combes as he pushed to improve his time in the wet conditions.

Hamilton stayed in front until the final minutes when first Kovalainen and then Heidfeld went fastest.