The car's the star with BAR

Motor Sport: Under the shadows of the landslide of apartment blocks, the darkening clouds rolling over the mountains and spilling down towards the glittering towers of Monaco's casino, Michael Schumacher was muttering darkly about imminent disaster for his Ferrari team. Crying wolf again.

Two weeks ago in Barcelona, Schumacher targeted Jenson Button's BAR as a major threat - just 24 hours before cruising to victory number five out of five. This time out, he expanded his gloomy horizons further. "Renault will also be a threat," he said, "and I realise above all that BAR are in good shape. Monaco is a little like Imola and I seem to recall they were good there." You could almost hear the crack of doom sounding.

From a driver so comprehensively dominant this season, so pessimistic an analysis sounded faintly ludicrous. This weekend though, Schumacher may at last have a point. Tomorrow morning he might just look up the grid and spy a vulpine Button or Jarno Trulli bearing lean and hungry looks.

With an average speed of just 90 m.p.h. around the principality's labyrinthine streets, the weekend is not about power, it's about precision. The one race of the year where control of a modern Formula One car is largely handed back to its driver. Sure, the set-up concerns, the tyre worries still exist but Monaco still craves a nerveless, inch-perfect performance from the man behind the wheel. Step a foot wide into the funnelling Sainte Devote right-hander and there's no way back. Merciless, magnificent and frankly, just a little bit mad, Monaco is the great leveller.

And it could be a day on which Button and Trulli get a first taste of victory. Or the day when wunderkind Fernando Alonso, eight races on from his first victory at the Hungaroring last year, adds to his trophy cabinet. Or could Kimi Raikkonen find brief comfort in the midst of a nightmare season?

After Thursday's efforts, Schumacher's dark forecasts looked about as accurate as predictions of snow in the Sahara as he rocketed to a four tenths lead at the top of the free practice timesheets over BAR test driver Anthony Davidson.

Take into account, too, Schumacher's exemplary record around Monaco's streets - he's tilting at matching Ayrton Senna's record of six wins at the venue - and the likelihood of any predators actually challenging him in this afternoon's crucial qualifying session appear to retreat faster than Roman Abramovich - here this weekend aboard a yacht the size of Stamford Bridge - can yet again deny rumours of a Jordan buy-out.

Nevertheless, the wolves are circling and are not as toothless as at previous races. On Thursday, all three BARs running were startlingly quick with Button topping the sheets for most of the afternoon session before Davidson on his first visit to the track put in his blistering lap.

Trulli and Alonso too looked comfortable, with Trulli pointedly admitting: "we know the car is quick here, we just have to find a set-up we're comfortable with."

Trulli, in particular, is a threat. Always quick over a single lap, Trulli is something of a Monaco specialist. He qualified a useful but not front-running Jordan EJ10 to second in 2000 and in 2002 raced to fourth place in Renault's first largely uncompetitive first season back in F1.

Alonso, too, is a potential Monaco star. Naturally gifted, he was fifth in Monaco last year in his first race season with Renault.

Button's record is less impressive with just a seventh place to show from four attempts but it is BAR's car that carries the advantage this weekend not their drivers. Both are capable of taking their superb BAR 006 to the front of the grid and if they can achieve that then preventing Schumacher taking a sixth win of the season from six starts is possible.

Whither last year's winner, Juan Pablo Montoya, in all this? On Thursday, the Colombian's FW26 looked dreadful over the tight streets, unstable and on the edge of disaster with every savage turn of the steering wheel. Afterwards, Montoya admitted he felt Williams don't have the pace or the car for him to double his Monaco tally, and with team-mate Ralf Schumacher already demoted 10 places on the grid after requiring an engine change on Thursday the team's chances don't look promising.

Having said that, don't rule out an all or nothing qualifying charge from Montoya, a driver who first shot to prominence with an outrageously combative drive in 1998's F3000 race around these streets.

And McLaren? On Thursday, Raikkonen was a respectable fifth fastest on a circuit where his troublesome MP4/19 is likely to get its sole chance to really compete this season and he and team-mate David Coulthard were happy with their pace on Thursday.

In a place that is a homage to the suspension of disbelief, just about anything can happen. But the likelihood of Michael Schumacher bringing a reality check to this realm of fantasy remains irresistible.