Australia Saturday quotes: Mercedes

Michael Schumacher - 7th: "We had a reasonable qualifying session today and I am ok with the outcome even if I was a bit handicapped by traffic, especially on my final quick lap. We made some changes with the car after practice this morning which did not work out perfectly. But in general I would guess the ranking that we see now reflects the situation well and our performance is probably the maximum for our car at the moment. Anyhow, we still have a lot in hand for tomorrow's race, and I am on the clean side of the grid for the start. As we all know, a lot can happen over the course of a race."

Ross Brawn: "Whilst we weren't necessarily able to compete with the top three, I thought we might have done a bit better today, and certainly be fighting for fourth and fifth places. We didn't really seem to get smooth runs and whilst it's the same for everybody with the conditions and traffic, the little things just didn't quite come together for us today. The car is good so we're a little disappointed but we know what we've got to do. We've got to find some time to compete with the guys in the top two or three positions and that's our objective."

Norbert Haug: "It was not quite the optimum result that we could have achieved today but better than fourth place would not have been possible. We know that there is more work to be done in order to improve our technical package and catch up to the Red Bulls and Alonso's Ferrari which were out of reach. This will happen step by step and it will take some time. Nico and Michael did a good job within the possibilities that we currently have and are split by less than half a tenth of a second. We will try to do a better job tomorrow and improve our positions during the race."