McLaren: Last of the late stoppers?

McLaren drivers Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen qualified fifth and sixth in Malaysia after putting heavy fuel loads in at the start of the final session.

Kimi's drive from the back of the grid to third in Bahrain underlined the potential of the MP4-21, and proved that a one-stop strategy makes a lot of sense. Rivals are guessing that the silver cars may have the possibility to run a one stop on Sunday, and at the very least they will be stopping significantly later than the four cars ahead of them on the grid.

McLaren's high fuel qualifying strategy made a lot of sense, especially after both Schumacher brothers were out of the picture, meaning that the worst that JPM and Kimi could do was seventh and eighth. In fact Renault messed up with Fernando Alonso, and with Christian Klien opting out, they did a little better than that.

Some of the penalised cars at he back of the grid will definitely stop once, and Alonso now has that option as well.

"Of course we would have been happy to have been more to the front," said Raikkonen. "But I think the car was pretty OK. Not ideal, but is not too bad where we start. We just have to wait and see where the other people are stopping, and hopefully we can gain some places.

"The car is not perfect yet, but it's always about the set-up. In the morning it was slightly better, then in the qualifying I was not exactly happy with it. But it's not far away from what is perfect. It's always hard to really know what's going to happen in qualifying, and you just hope that it's going to be good in the race."

"I think on strategy and things we look quite good," said Montoya. "It's hard to say... if you look at my pace last race in qualifying we were P5, and even like that it was probably, fuel corrected, the fastest lap. So I think we have to wait and see when stops come, and how the race develops. If we have a good enough race pace, we should be able to fight for the win.

"Yesterday we kinda went in the wrong direction, and at least we had a bit of a heading about where to go. We changed the car a lot for this morning. This morning I did one run on old tyres and one on brand new tyres, and that was it, then qualifying. You don't have a lot of time to change the car, but we're heading in the right direction. The car felt really good in qualifying, and hopefully it works the same way on old tyres. So far we look very reliable, we'll see what happens."

One of the problems of the McLaren strategy is that the cars are on the third row and thus much more vulnerable through Sepang's notorious first and second corners than if they'd started at the front. However, Kimi says he's not concerned about that.

"It's much better to start from fifth or sixth than 12th or something. Anything can always happen, but for sure we'll try to be careful in the first few corners, try to gain some places, try to also not have an accident or lose the front wing.

"I think it's important to score as many points as we can in the first few races, and once we get back to Europe, I think we're going to start pushing the car more on the limit."