The Ferrari's were only fourth [Schumacher] and sixth [Rubens Barrichello] fastest after the first part of the qualifying session, which in its entirety lasted longer than two hours – more than the mandatory time limit for a grand prix distance!

But the Italian team had the disadvantage of sweeping up the track as they were the first cars out in the opening qualifying stint. Their true pace emerged on their second runs. Rubens Barrichello, who admitted that he spent free practice concentrating on a good race set-up rather than qualifying pace, starts third.

“We were much quicker than I expected,” said Ferrari's technical director Ross Brawn. “That was a perfect lap by Michael and the engineers did a great job to get the car ready for him. Michael said the car was absolutely spot on.

“I thought qualifying would be harder, but we don't know what strategies everyone else is on so we will have to wait until the race to see what shape we are in.

“There is a lot that can happen tomorrow. I think that tyres will be crucial because of the hot temperatures and there is even some talk of rain. So we are happy about today but approaching tomorrow with our usual caution.”

WilliamsF1's Juan Pablo Montoya was fourth fastest and a little surprised that the pace he had shown in free practice this morning had disappeared: “After the first qualifying lap I thought, ‘Where is it? What happened? We didn't change anything!' But on the second lap I picked up a vibration and I don't think we could have got pole anyway.

“But the real question is how good are they [Ferrari] going to be in the race and how good are we going to be? I think I have a good race car and I'm looking forward to it.”

Kimi Raikkonen raised McLaren's spirits after a dismal performance two weeks ago in Australia and was just over a tenth slower than Montoya's 1m34.054s time. While Jenson Button maintained his record of out-qualifying former WilliamsF1 team-mate Ralf Schumacher in every race so far this year with sixth place. Ralf was next up, another slightly baffled as to where the pace of his WilliamsF1 FW26 had gone during the afternoon.

Renault had looked all set for a repeat of its 2003 front row lock-out after the first set of timed laps. Fernando Alonso headed the times ahead of his team-mate Jarno Trulli. But in the all-important second runs, the Italian lapped over a second slower than he had initially, while Alonso spun into the gravel at Turn 13 trying desperately to match Schumacher's blistering pace.

David Coulthard was ninth fastest ahead of Cristiano da Matta who salvaged tenth for Toyota having spent most of the weekend in and out of gravel traps with a balance problem.

Felipe Massa was all smiles after outqualifying his highly-rated team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella for the second race running. Christian Klein was 13th, the Austrian admitted yesterday that he considered Sepang a hard circuit to learn and demonstrated this with a lap 1.4s slower than Jaguar team-mate Webber's.

Olivier Panis placed 14th ahead of the first Cosworth-powered car - the Jordan driven by Nick Heidfeld. Gianmaria Bruni and Zsolt Baumgartner's Minardis were next and the timed placings were rounded up by Giorgio Pantano.

Takuma Sato caused the session to be stopped when he spun at Turn 13 and, like Alonso, did not record a time.