> Mika Hakkinen test for McLaren

Mika Hakkinen tested for the team with which he won 2 World Championships in the late nineties in Barcelona.

He tested for 79 laps and was off by 3 secs from the leader Ferrari's Luca Badoer. But the Finn said that the test was not all fun and he hoped he had given some useful feedback for the team's development work.

It was the first time in 5 years that he has driven an F1 car.

"It has been an exciting day for me and I have really enjoyed the opportunity to drive a Formula 1 car after a five year break, made even more special as it was with Team McLaren Mercedes that I won my two world championships with,” he said.

“Although it was great fun today I also had to do some serious work for the team, as any feedback I could give them from today's experience will help them with their preparations for the 2007 season.

“As a result I was really pushing to try and do the best job that I could to assist them in any way possible.”

“I spent the morning really acclimatising to the environment of the cockpit again and just getting to grips with driving a 2006 car, I didn't expect to be quick straight away, and Barcelona is of course a hard track on both the car and driver,” he said.

“It took several laps before I was up to speed, but we were all expecting this to be the case.

“We have done some good work today and got some great results and I am really grateful to the team for this opportunity and the mechanics for working so hard for me."

He finished less than 2 seconds off the pace of Lewis Hamilton and about 0.6 seconds slower than the next slowest man Vitantonio Luizzi.

But he explained that he could have quicker but instead he had not pushed the limits, preferring to do a professional job for his former team than crash and miss the chance to answer his own curiosity.

After finishing this test, Mika Hakkinen was extremely pleased with his performance and said that he wanted to do more such tests in F1.

"Naturally to start doing a second test or more tests I will get stronger and quicker," he said.

"I will have more knowledge about what tools we can use and can help more for the future. But I don't know.

"We have to discuss and think about it. And see what happens."

"Maybe with the fuel level down to a minimum, maybe then we could get down to a good lap time," he said.

"But that was not the intention.

"The plan was to run the same fuel level all the time, which are high enough to work on the race configuration.

"Maybe if we had a new set of tyres then maybe the lap time could have been 1.2 to two seconds faster. That (lap times) was not the issue."

Asked whether his future remains in the DTM, Hakkinen who has yet to confirm that he will continue racing for Mercedes in the German tin-top series, Mika replied: "My answer is still the same. We will see…"