We develop free-derivative preconditioned residual methods for solving nonlinear steady fluid flows. The new scheme is based on a variable implicit preconditioning technique associated to the globalized spectral residual method. It is adapted for computing in a numerical way the steady state of the bi-dimensional and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations (NSE). We use finite differences for the discretization and consider both the primary variables and the stream function-vorticity formulations of the problem. Our numerical results agree with the ones in the literature and show the robustness of our method for Reynolds numbers up to Re=5000.