09/07/2004
NEWS STORY
Jean Todt: We are at what is the home track for our main rivals and they have shown themselves to be very competitive, which is what we had expected. As usual, we worked on tyre choice and on finding the best set-up. It is very difficult to assess the relative strengths of the other teams, not knowing what fuel loads and tyres they were running. For our part, we have picked up valuable data which we will now be studying. There is still work to do on the cars but we believe we can aspire to the top places in qualifying tomorrow, before moving on to concentrate on Sunday's race.
Michael Schumacher: It was a slightly different Friday to the usual for us due to the fact that we expected rain in the second session, so we set ourselves a bigger workload in the morning. In the second session, we tried a few variations in set-up which worked very well. Overall, I am quite happy with our performance today. We know the competition is tough with some of them looking very strong today. However, I believe we will be in the fight for the win. Now we have to work out the best way to go about achieving that.
Rubens Barrichello: This morning's session was very straightforward, but in the afternoon, I encountered a few problems while evaluating the tyres. However, we have a good base line in terms of the set-up of the car to suit this track and I am sure that a bit more work tomorrow morning will get us back on track.
Ross Brawn: We were expecting rain for the second hour, so we reversed our usual Friday programme, especially with Michael who only ran on used tyres in the afternoon. Therefore it is harder than usual to make comparisons to the opposition. We gathered a lot of data which we will study carefully this afternoon. From what we could see, the Bridgestone tyres are working well and performing very consistently. We still have to find the best balance on Rubens' car when running new tyres, while the situation is looking pretty good on worn ones. I think we can be reasonably optimistic about the rest of the weekend.