Kimi Raikkonen unconcerned by the pace of Ferrari's rivals after Friday practice at Hockenheim.

Kimi Raikkonen admitted that he was looking at the Friday practice times for the German Grand Prix 'with a degree of caution' after setting the fourth quickest time at Hockenheim.

The defending champion was third fastest during the afternoon running having earlier been fifth in a damp opening session of the day.

That left him fourth overall on the combined time-sheets although his fastest time was some seven-tenths of a second behind Lewis Hamilton, who set the pace in both the morning and afternoon for McLaren.

However, Raikkonen said he wasn't concerned by the pace of his British rival and said it was important to remember that teams will have been working through different programmes in preparation for the weekend's race.

"Friday's results always need to be looked at with a degree of caution as you never know for certain what the other teams were doing and today is no exception to that rule," he said. "For our part, we tried to improve the set-up of the car compared to the point we had reached at the end of the test and we found, especially towards the end of the day, a few settings that could be interesting. So, I am reasonably pleased with how things went and I think that there is still room for improvement.

"The times of our main rivals? As I said at the start, there are too many question marks to be certain: what I can say is that we will be competitive, especially as right up until the final minutes, the times were all very similar."

Team-mate Felipe Massa finished just ahead of Raikkonen on the times and the Brazilian was pleased with the way his opening day had gone.

"All in all, it was a good day," he reflected. "We were always competitive, as were our main rivals. It won't be a stroll in the park, but we can take them on. We also worked on a wet track and I feel I can claim we will be on the pace in any conditions.

"There was not much difference, today at least, in pure performance terms between the hard and soft tyres but I think the latter will be a little bit quicker still and will definitely be the right choice for qualifying. Now we have to study our data to be in the best possible shape for both qualifying and the race."