I guess you know the statistic, you've just broken Ayrton Senna's record for career pole positions.
Michael Schumacher: Yeah. With the car we had, getting a pole position in Bahrain, it was sort of obvious at one stage that we should be in a position to do so. We worked very hard, naturally - because of our misfortune and the mistakes we made in the last weeks – to make up ground and here we are, and we've made up significant ground. Obviously the race is important – this is one step towards it – but seeing where Fernando, in particular, is it's great for us in terms of first strategy and hopefully result as well by the end of the race.

Can you just describe your feelings, right now, here at Imola on this beautiful day, to achieve that record and to be back in front of your home crowd on the pole, what it means to you?
MS: Well, the record is less important in a way. You look at it once you finish your racing and you may think about it, but not now. It was a little bit mixed feelings because I came in and I didn't know (whether I was on pole), because I saw one Renault still out on the circuit and I wasn't sure whether there could have been a change in position or not, so it was a little bit of mixed feelings. But being here as an ambassador of San Marino, and getting pole position for all our tifosi after all the pain they've had to go through in the last weeks, I'm obviously very glad and very excited.

It looks to have been a very troublefree weekend so far; a little bit of incident there with your teammate at the top chicane, he went off just in front of you, but otherwise a great qualifying.
MS: Yeah, it wasn't really an incident, he was just trying to find his way and nevertheless, we performed very well. We kept mentioning and talking about it. This weekend I sort of stopped talking about it and rather thought I should show (our performance) and here we are.

Jenson, a great performance. Not particularly happy with the car yesterday but a great recovery today.
Jenson Button: Yeah, you know we've done a lot of work overnight and also during the day and we've really improved it. We needed to because we were quite a long way off yesterday, not just on one lap but also the long run pace. I'm much happier with the car now. We did a reasonably good run in practice also so not a bad position to be in.

And a strong position relative to the Renaults and the McLarens.
JB: Yeah, it's quite interesting. We'll have to see how the race pans out but yeah, they must be stopping very very late or they made mistakes, I don't know. I'm happy with my qualifying and it's great to have Rubens up here as well, for us both to be up here so it's a good start for tomorrow and hopefully we can make good use of it.

Rubens, great to see you up here next to your old teammate Michael Schumacher.
Rubens Barrichello: It's nice, very nice and I want to thank the whole team. The team has done a great job and in testing they were able to improve the car to my liking and the braking seems to be a lot better so I want to thank the whole team, the mechanics, the engineers, everyone for their effort. They know that I'm pushing very hard. I don't want to be playing second fiddle. There were some problems for me adapting to the car. Obviously I'm a little bit happier. Imola is quite a good place for an improvement and I think most of it, after the problems that we had in Australia, we had to improve the car on race pace, so tomorrow is a good test and we're going into it with a lot more optimism, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Michael, your final thoughts on the race tomorrow?
MS: Yeah, it's interesting to study this weekend. Up to a point, Renault were miles ahead of every other Michelin runner and then suddenly it seems to have turned around a bit but nevertheless the race pace seemed very competitive from them. So is ours, honestly. We don't have anything that is only good for one lap. We have worked very hard together with Bridgestone to have the optimum first lap but also have a very strong race pace and here, I think, we can certainly show this and at the end of the day we hope it's good enough to beat the rest. That's what it comes to and what counts.

Press Conference

Michael, you've been quick all weekend, so I don't suppose this was too much of a surprise.
MS: No, it's not too much of a surprise. Not only have we been quick here, we have been quick in testing in Barcelona. We were quick in Australia as well but we couldn't really do it all the time and now we worked very hard with Bridgestone to have a tyre which, quite frankly, we already had available in Australia but due to testing, bad weather conditions, we couldn't test it and we didn't want to risk it. Now, nevertheless, we know what we have to use and obviously it works very well.

How much of a gamble is the tyre choice this weekend?
MS: No big gamble. We're probably clear on what we brought here, what we wanted to have and Bridgestone is very well in this respect, in particular this year where we have made huge progress.

It looked pretty fraught with the two of you coming in for your tyre stops at the same time.
MS: We planned to be out very early which meant that we were together and as you go together, we have the same strategy in terms of trying to achieve the number of laps and in this respect, it was normal that we would stay together for almost all the time.