Michael, your seventieth win for Ferrari, a big dent in Fernando's championship lead, hundredth win for Bridgestone: a phenomenal day for you.
Michael Schumacher: Yeah. You're putting numbers on… they're very important but at the moment probably the most important is eleven because it's eleven points left in terms of championship lead for Fernando. We have had a superb weekend. Our car just functioned really great. We had a good work-out before coming here, the last and final test before the summer break. We worked very hard together with Bridgestone in order to sort out the whole position and get organised and understand everything up to the last detail. We improved the car, Shell is delivering great products, so it's a package which is the reason why we can perform as we do perform, although I have to say it was a bit of a surprise being that much in front but we'll take it, we'll really take it. It's the right moment in time when we need to have such a performance in order to bring down the gap in the championship and keep the pressure on. Yes, a superb a weekend for all of us.
It looked that way from the outside. Were there any moments during the race that you would describe as in any way critical or risky? Anything bad happened to you at all today?
MS: Not really, no, no, there was nothing bad. Because we had such a margin we could really drive safely. It would have maybe been difficult and probably you saw cars going off the track because off line it was very dirty because we were running pretty soft compounds here and there's a lot of rubber next to the line, with all the dust and so on, and I think a car went off in the last corner because of that. Other cars probably had trouble, and driving on the limit was probably very difficult in a way. We didn't have to do that, so we didn't really have moments.
Felipe a fantastic team performance from you as well, out there behind Michael the whole way.
Felipe Massa: Yeah. That was our target today, especially looking at our performance yesterday morning, we saw that in race conditions we had a very strong pace and that was our target, to put both Ferraris in front. I think it was a great job from the team, from everybody, from our suppliers and everybody, and I think me and Michael just tried to pull out the gap straightaway and then we were just looking to finish first and second.
You make it sound fairly matter-of-fact but for you it's a big change in terms of your career; it's becoming almost routine for you to finish on the podium. What a change for you!
FM: Yeah, for sure. I'm getting used to the podium a bit, just not the first place, so hopefully we're starting to get there, working hard and just looking to push hard at every race to improve and to be there at every race. It's important to be on the podium at every race and I think my time will come.
Kimi, congratulations to you: P3, a three stop strategy and just finishing your first German Grand Prix – there seemed to be a fire after the race…
Kimi Raikkonen: Yeah, it happens quite a lot when you slow down. The heat shield just caught fire, so nothing too serious.
Talk through your race: on the pole, an early pit stop, talk through your strategy and your thinking as you went into this race and how it panned out for you?
KR: Yeah, actually I think we had some problems yesterday, to be honest, between the second and last qualifying. When we were fuelling the car we really didn't get as much fuel as we wanted. Then it turned out that we needed to get on pole because we knew that we didn't have as much fuel as planned but in the end it worked out pretty well, because we came in quite early although the tyres were on the limit. I blistered my second set also, so it was a bit difficult at that moment. I also had a hydraulic problem so I lost a place to Jenson earlier. Because of that, the car was behaving really badly and I wasn't getting full power and the gearshifting was all over the place. Looking at those things, we are happy to finish third and the end of the race was very strong for us, so no problems.
And you lost time in the pits with the jammed wheel nut.
KR: Yeah, so I think we had a lot of problems, but in the end we were still quick enough to gain all that time back on the circuit, so it shows we have definitely improved the car, but there is still some way to go to beat the Ferraris, but I think we are getting there and hopefully next race we can do better.
Michael, your race engineer Chris Dyer was saying on the slow-down lap ‘all you've got to do now, Michael, is win the remaining races and you can be World Champion.'
KR: Yeah, you can't really expect that, but naturally, with the performance we have shown in the last three races against our competitor, it gives us great confidence that at least for some more races we can probably keep that and hopefully reduce the gap in the championship pretty significantly, quickly, so we might come back to a more normal situation in the last races where it's going one to us and one to the other, because we have to expect that Renault will come back at some stage, to keep on winning a race, more races. We will have to find out, so it's very important that we use that opportunity. This period and motivation and the feeling within the team is really superb and there's a lot of thanks to Felipe who is doing a great job within the team, in testing and concentrating and just doing great and I'm happy to have him as my team mate.
Press Conference
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