Schumacher Hopes Progress Continues

The outgoing World Champion crucially managed to beat Renault's Giancarlo Fisichella in a straight fight and is keeping his fingers crossed that Ferrari may finally be getting on top of their troubles.

His fourth place and Barrichello's sixth place has helped the team extend their advantage over Toyota in their fight for third place in the Constructors' Championship.

"We had a reasonable race today, certainly better than the last few," he said. "The Constructors' Championship is important to us and from that perspective this was a good result. Maybe this afternoon's positive tendency can continue in the final two races."

Ferrari sporting director Jean Todt believes that the team and tyre supplier Bridgestone must continue to push hard in the final two races of the season in a bid to improve their preparations for 2006.

"Along with Bridgestone, we face a lot of work to develop the tyres," he said. "We must do our utmost in these next two rounds, because they can produce precious data that can even be useful for next year. Today, our cars proved reliable, the team worked very well and the drivers gave their all."

Barrichello's race was compromised by the Brazilian getting stuck behind traffic for much of the afternoon - which meant he was never able to lap at his true pace.

"I had a good race, but I was blocked by the people ahead of me and I had nowhere to go really and could never really push to the maximum," he said. "It was a shame.

"I had a particularly exciting battle with Jenson which was a bit crazy because it was a bit wet on the inside line.  I just tried hard not to create any problems for myself.  If it hadn't been for the difficulty in qualifying yesterday, I could have had a much better race as the car returned to normal today.

"The only problem I had this afternoon was with twenty laps to go, when the power steering started pushing me to the left.  Sixth was the best I could do."