Italian GP: Mercedes not ruling out Monza victory

Schumacher and Rosberg will start fourth and sixth respectively, and with the race shaping up to be a one-stopper, Rosberg is confident that the Mercedes will have plenty of race pace following his long runs during Friday's practice sessions.

"We prepared very well for it [on Friday] with long runs," he said.

"We have a good understanding of what the tyres are going to do, so I'm quite confident that we can have a good race, and be in the region where we were in qualifying, or maybe even look forward."

Schumacher even went as far as to suggest that McLaren could be a target during the race, despite Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button locking out the front row.

"We need to see how the day tomorrow will develop, because we are not that far off," said the seven-time world champion.

"But we might be just enough behind that it might be difficult to challenge them. If you take the qualifying performance and you extract that to the race, maybe that's not completely true. It's something to prove tomorrow."

After a tough weekend in Belgian at the last round, Rosberg said he was happy to be closer to the front, before warning that the improvement was more down to the circuit than the car.

"It's been very nice coming here. Already on Friday it was clear that we were looking much better, and that's a really nice feeling. The car feels better, and you know you have a chance to be right up there. We worked well this weekend in qualifying in the end.

"For sure it's circuit specific. We didn't bring any specific things to massively improve the performance of the car, it's just a different package for this sort of track, and this sort of track seems to suit us a lot better than, for example, Spa and Hungary.

"That's also an area which we will know review and learn from, why our car is looking stronger here and not so much at a place like Spa."