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.”