Raikkonen's quick off the mark
Kimi Raikkonen followed up his Belgian victory by setting the pace in today’s second practice for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
Raikkonen won his and McLaren’s first race of the season at Spa-Francorchamps to cap a remarkable change in fortunes after a dreadful start to 2004.
He maintained that momentum this afternoon by taking top spot in second practice, although his lap of one minute 20.846 seconds was slower than Michael Schumacher’s morning best.
Schumacher, crowned world champion in Belgium, was unable to repeat that pace in second practice and ended the session third, behind Ferrari team-mate Rubens Barrichello.
Jenson Button offered hope of a strong result this weekend by setting the fourth quickest time in his BAR, with test driver Anthony Davidson holding his own in eighth after 37 laps.
David Coulthard was 10th quickest for McLaren in second practice, just over a second down on his team-mate.
Davidson set the pace early on even though the grid’s top drivers ventured out on the track early in the one-hour session.
The Englishman stayed on top for 20 minutes until BAR team-mate Takuma Sato bettered his effort while Williams’ Juan Pablo Montoya pushed Davidson down another position soon after.
The first chicane, at the end of the super-fast start-finish straight, again caused problems for the drivers.
After eight incidents in first practice, several more were caught out in the second session with Mark Webber suffering most when he spun his Jaguar after misjudging his braking.
BAR’s spell out front ended with 35 minutes gone when Schumacher clocked his first meaningful lap to go quickest by a quarter of a second.
With 13 minutes remaining, Williams stand-in Antonio Pizzonia suffered a heavy accident on the last corner. The Brazilian lost control under braking and spun through the gravel to hit a tyre wall backwards, although he emerged unhurt.
Button had been quiet for much of the day but managed a strong run to go second as the end of the session approached. That soon became third though when Raikkonen took a quarter of a second off Schumacher’s lap. Barrichello came within a whisker of Raikkonen’s time to move up to second.
Schumacher took his customary place at the top of the timing sheets in first practice, with his lap of 1:20.526.
That ended up as the fastest lap of the day and beat team-mate Barrichello into second place by 0.335secs. Davidson again showed well, taking third spot.
