Silverstone test - day three: 15 September.

With Renault and McLaren having finished their tests yesterday, Christian Klien took full advanatage to top the timesheets on the final day of testing at Silverstone.

The Red Bull Racing driver completed 52 laps of the home of British Motorsport, despite wet weather conditions hampering the drivers throughout the day, a best lap of 1min 20.272secs good enough to beat Antonio Pizzonia to top spot by nearly half a second.

Pizzonia, again sharing testing duties with GP2 runner Nico Rosberg, just edged out the second Red Bull of Vitantonio Liuzzi, with Rosberg two tenths behind the Italian in fourth.

"Today we finished testing at Silverstone with Antonio and Nico," Williams technical Sam Michael said. "Most of the day was spent testing intermediate tyres and working through some comparisons for Michelin, but also on traction control and starts. Rain hampered Thursday morning's session but, towards the end of the day, the track finally dried out which enabled us to finalise some work on Suzuka tyre compounds."

Ralf Schumacher finished the final day of testing as the lead Toyota runner in fifth place, although the German was unable to work through his full programme as a result of the poor weather conditions.

"We spent Wednesday working mainly on tyres for Suzuka," he said. "We also did some work on brakes, steering and weight distribution and everything went well. For Thursday we had lined up a back-to-back test of the TF105 and the TF105B but the wet weather didn't allow us to reap the full benefits.

"We were hoping to have a direct comparison but the weather took a turn for the worse and the wet conditions made it impossible to get a realistic idea of the relative performance. But it was good to have a run in the B car which is a useful part of our development programme for 2006."

Japanese driver Sakon Yamamoto continued to acclimatise to the Jordan he will use at his home Grand Prix, where he will perform third driver duties, with the sixth fastest time - albeit five seconds off the pace of Klien - with Olivier Panis the slowest man in track, although the Frenchman spent his day working on wet launches rather than putting in a lap time.

"We had a really positive week of work on the B car," he said. "It was a big step forward compared to the last test, when we had some technical problems. This time things worked much better so it is a big step in the right direction.

"It felt really good everywhere. It was good in both low and high speed corners, it seemed to have less understeer than the TF105 and it had more front grip in general. Unfortunately the weather was too bad to do much work on the last morning so I just did some wet launches. But I'm sure this test will be useful for our work for next year."

Technical director Mike Gascoyne also declared himself pleased with the test, even if the weather had played its part in disrupting the team's plans.

"We had a very successful test with the TF105B, which features a different front suspension from the TF105," he said. "We had a problem with the power steering at the previous test, but here at Silverstone we were able to eradicate it. That meant we were able to get on and evaluate the car properly. We initially planned to test the car for only one day but we lengthened that to the entire test, and the results were very positive."

Leading performances (15 September) - Silverstone:

Christian Klien Red Bull-Cosworth 1m 20.272s 52 lapsAntonio Pizzonia Williams-BMW 1m 20.750s 66 lapsVitantonio Liuzzi Red Bull-Cosworth 1m 20.922s 39 lapsNico Rosberg Williams-BMW 1m 21.152s 66 lapsRalf Schumacher Toyota-Toyota 1m 22.098s 33 lapsSakon Yamamoto Jordan-Toyota 1m 25.933s 69 lapsOlivier Panis Toyota-Toyota 1m 40.684s 10 laps

all times unofficial - courtesy of Williams