Rubens Barrichello topped the times again on the third day at Silverstone as nine teams continued their testing efforts in preparation for the Canadian Grand Prix at Montreal.

Barrichello finished quickest of the day

The Brazilian had another solid day's running and clearly set the pace by more than a second. Ferrari tried various set-ups for the British Grand Prix in early July. The track was again wet in the morning, but it dried up during the day and in the afternoon teams could work efficiently on their machines. Nonetheless there were again several interruptions and off-track excursions.

Allan McNish came in 2nd and was reasonably happy: 'We continued to try and get our tyre test done and in the end we did a limited programme. However things are shaping up well and the car was feeling good today.' Mika Salo (15th) was also present for Toyota, but he had a troubled session, which didn't prevent him from being optimistic: 'We collected all the necessary data and the new front and rear wing assemblies are looking good.'

Anyway it was Fernando Alonso's turn to take the limelight today as he got a first taste of the Jaguar R3, in which he was told to set a benchmark to be compared to the other drivers of the team. The Spainard did a brillant job and ended up in 3rd position, even slightly quicker than Pedro de la Rosa. The engineers focused their efforts on driver evaluation as there are no technical modifications to the package until the British Grand Prix later on.

At Sauber, Nick Heidfeld took over from Massa. He wasn't competitive enough and had a scary moment when he hit a bird at Bridge corner: 'It just flew straight into my helmet.' The rest of the day was 'not easy' for him according to a press release: 'You'd make a change to the car and then as soon as you went out to try it it would start to rain again.'

The Renault drivers finished in 9th and 10th respectively. 'Although the weather has meant we haven’t done as much running as we would have liked this week, we are nevertheless pleased with what we have achieved,' said Technical Director Mike Gascoyne. 'We have established base-line set-ups for Canada and Silverstone, as well as conducting useful development of electronic systems.'

Thursday classification: