Schumacher Hoping to Delight Ferrari Fans

Michael Schumacher kept the fans in party mood on Friday by leading a Ferrari one-two in free practice for the Formula One champions' Italian homecoming.

Schumacher, returning to Ferrari's home track with both the titles won and a string of records under his belt, lapped 0.225 of a second quicker than Brazilian teammate Rubens Barrichello.

Schumacher's time of 1:22.433 was only two tenths off Juan Pablo Montoya's 2001 pole time and suggested that, weather permitting, Formula One could be in for the fastest race in history on Sunday.

Monza, the fastest track on the calendar and last race of the European season, holds the current record with an average speed of 150.76 mph set by Briton Peter Gethin in a BRM in 1971. Last year's race, won by Montoya in a Williams, saw an average of 148.572 and lap times this season have been getting faster.

Ferrari fans unfurled a giant banner in the main grandstand hailing the champions but there were still empty seats on a largely incident-free day as the Ferraris went through their set-up routine.

Schumacher has dominated the year, becoming the first driver to win 10 times in a single season, and is set to set a points record on Sunday as well as chalking up his 17th successive podium finish.

"We hope to offer our tifosi a good performance here in Italy, because they really deserve it," said the German after the session. "We had quite a full programme which worked out well. We did some tyre checks, we made a few set-up-changes trying to improve our performance, and we can be quite confident, even if at this stage of the weekend nobody knows too much.

"Compared to the test here last week, which went quite well even if all the times were quite close, Bridgestone have come up with even better tyres."

Barrichello had managed only two laps in the morning before being sidelined by a brake problem but he was soon up to speed in an overcast afternoon session.

"All in all, it was a good day's work," said the Brazilian. "I know that I had to miss almost all the morning session because of a brake problem, but we've already done a lot of running here last week and, in any case, in the afternoon we were still able to collect a considerable amount of data.

"Tomorrow we think that it's going to be a really tight qualifying session: the tests last week showed us that the times of the leading cars are going to be very close to each other. We think that we're going to be very competitive here."