Schumacher: press conference

Congratulations, Michael, on your 34th win and moving into the lead of the World Championship. The fans obviously enjoyed seeing a Ferrari win at Imola for the first time in 16 years. You look as though you enjoyed the race.

Oh, yes. It's always a good feeling to be driving around Imola when you drive a Ferrari.

Today it felt good already on the parade lap. Being as well supported as we are here, and after such a long time without a victory, it was a great feeling to deliver the wishes of the fans after all the suffering at the beginning of the season.

I really enjoyed going round slowly afterwards, looking into the faces of the people. I was soaking it up.

Was the car good throughout the race?

Yes. We made a little modification to the front wing during the race. Other than that, it was quite good.

What were your feelings after the start when the two McLaren drivers were ahead of you? At that stage Mika was pulling away ...

'The way it looked it seemed obvious to me that one of them was on a one-stop strategy and the other was on two stops.

I didn't want to let the gap separating me from David open up too much, I preferred to drive a nice race until the moment came to push. That's what I did: I waited until I knew it was the right moment to go for it.

What was your own pit stop strategy?

'Basically, we were going for a strategy which would give us two options - and we took the option according to the way the race was going.

Obviously Ross Brawn is in charge of the final decision on that, and we communicated a bit, but I left the choice to him. I knew that he had a better understanding of what would be the ideal strategy, and it was he who decided.

I know that if we had gone for one stop we would have stayed in second position. The two-stop strategy gave us the possibility of being able to jump ahead, and even if that hadn't happened, we would still have been in 2nd place. There was no big risk involved, so we went for it. And it worked out well.

At the second stop, were you confident that you would still be leading when you returned to the track?

Yes, as I saw the gap increasing, and having built up a lead of almost 20 seconds, I knew that was enough.

So I kept it at that and waited until the time came round for my pit stop. David started pushing a bit harder at that stage, but I didn't need to risk anything then, so I just concentrated on my strategy.

As we mentioned yesterday, there was some spectacular driving in qualifying. At times today you looked to be on the limit again. Were you pushing at 100 per cent?

Especially during the 14-lap [middle] run, I was probably doing qualifying speeds. For the first 30 laps it was important to take everything smoothly, make sure that you didn't destroy the tyres and keep the gap as close as you thought you could afford to allow it.

After that, it was more or less qualifying speeds. The last stint was a matter of carrying the car to the finish and driving it home.