European GP: Ferrari Friday notes

Working towards the race

Jean Todt

"At the risk of being boring, I have to say again that this was the usual Friday routine when, as usual, we worked towards the race. We concentrated on set-up and tyres. This is the first time we have run on the new layout here at the Nuerburgring. As expected, cars are lapping around 15 seconds slower than in the past. We noticed that the kerbs are rather steep. One aspect which has been different to what we were expecting is the temperature, which is cooler than in the past few days. That should be the trend through to the end of the weekend. Tomorrow, we can expect the usual battle for the front row places and our aim is to get both our cars onto the two front rows of the grid."

Michael Schumacher

"It was the usual Friday, spent preparing for Sunday's race. We tried a few changes to the set-up on the car and worked on a comparison programme between the two type of tyre. There is still some work to do in terms of finding the right set-up. Nevertheless, I am pretty optimistic for the rest of the weekend, as we seem to be very competitive on all types of track and there is no reason why that should not be the case here."

Rubens Barrichello

"This morning the car felt very good. We were learning about the changes to the track layout. We made a change to the car, but this afternoon it did not seem to have gone the way we expected. It would have taken too much time to go back to our initial settings, so we stayed with the same settings for the rest of the session. However, we have learned quite a lot for the race. As for tomorrow's qualifying, I am reasonably optimistic and I think we will be fighting against our usual opponents for the top four places."

Ross Brawn

"We concentrated on race preparation as usual. We tried both types of tyre available to us and one of them proved to be quicker but a bit less consistent. Now, we will study the data to make a choice for qualifying and the race. It is very difficult to find the right balance for the car. The new section of track is quite interesting and demanding and the drivers don't yet seem to have found the right way to tackle it. We used the new engine cover this morning, which produced the results we were expecting. This afternoon, we ran the old one to make a comparison. All in all it was a pretty positive day."

Michael Schumacher 2nd
1:32.041 38 laps
chassis no. 221

Rubens Barrichello 4th
1'32"969 39 laps
chassis no. 220

-ferrari-