Schumacher Unsure about F2002 Debut Date

Michael Schumacher believes it is possible that his Ferrari team will introduce their new F2002 car in time for the Malaysian Grand Prix on March 17, but the German driver is still unsure about when will the new machine debut.

A lack of testing time in the build-up to the Australian race forced the World Champion team to ditch the new car and use the old machine to open their title defence. But with one week of testing available between the Melbourne event and the next race, at Sepang, Schumacher is hopeful the team will be able to find enough reliability to run the car in the second race of the season.

"It depends really how much work we are going to be able to do between now and Malaysia," said Schumacher. "We have one week of testing available, we are going to use this obviously to the maximum and then it depends what kind of job we can achieve."

Schumacher admitted he was not too happy to use the old car, but also suggested that the team had been forced to push so close to the limit that it would have been wrong to race the new F2002 in Australia.

"We pushed very hard, everything to the limit, which might pay out later but it didn't pay out initially. How much we suffer from that, that's going to be the question mark which nobody knows.

"To some degree you are not so delighted but what can you do? The situation has obviously been provoked to some degree because we knew we have a backup solution. And there was a point when we had to decide where to concentrate on and this decision was better to be earlier than the last day of testing, so we then decided to concentrate on the old car."