Ralf targets top 10 in qualifying

The Toyota driver put on his strongest qualifying performance at Silverstone two weeks ago as he appeared to be leaving his problems behind following a dismal start to the season.

Schumacher continued with his progress in today's practice, finishing as fifth quickest in the afternoon and now the German is looking to keep the momentum in tomorrow's qualifying.

"We had a good two sessions today," said Schumacher. "It's good to be back driving in front of my home fans again and I am pretty happy with the work we did, and especially with our laptimes. In the last few races we have changed a few things with our set-up and that has helped.

"My pace was quite competitive in France and Silverstone, even if the results were not there, and that seems to apply to this circuit as well. We worked on the car set-up, as well as understanding the tyres on this track, and everything went well.

"The team has a lot of information now, more than we expected because the rain stopped earlier than predicted, which gave us the chance to do a few more laps than usual.

"We are pushing very hard and my target for tomorrow is to get into Q3 again, which will give us the opportunity to fight for points. We will work on the car before qualifying and I am feeling optimistic."

Jarno Trulli completed a strong day for the Japanese squad, the Italian posting the sixth fastest time.

"It was a reasonable session for me," Trulli said. "You can see from our laptimes that I was really competitive today. It's a shame that in the end I had traffic on my quickest lap in P2, so I lost a bit of time - otherwise I could have been even faster and further up the results.

"But nevertheless it is important that we are going in the right direction and making progress. We want to score points in every race this year so we want a good result this weekend for everyone at the team, especially as this is a home race for us.

"As always, we are fighting hard but every race is a different story so we will have to see what happens tomorrow in qualifying. I am aiming to qualify once again in the top 10, even though the competition is very tough.

"If we can improve the car a little bit tomorrow before qualifying, we can have a good weekend."