• Australian Grand Prix

Schumacher looking forward to a competitive weekend

Michael Schumacher was happy with his Friday showing © Getty Images

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• Australian Grand Prix Free Practice 2

Michael Schumacher is confident Mercedes has brought a competitive car to this weekend's Australian Grand Prix, after finishing fourth in Friday's standings.

In the closing stages of the afternoon practice session Schumacher looked capable of setting the fastest lap until a slight mistake in the penultimate corner cost him time on his final attempt. Mercedes was off the pace of the front runners at the last race but Schumacher is expecting a closer battle this weekend.

"As often on Fridays, the performance is difficult to judge as everybody seemed to be on different programmes," he said. "Having said that, I am quite happy with today's sessions, even if we did not run too much overall. My first session was a bit handicapped by red flags, later we faced some rain in the second session. But all in all, we learned a lot and we could improve the set up of our car quite reasonably. In the end our times were competitive so I think we can look forward to the rest of the weekend."

Schumacher was consistently slower than his team-mate Nico Rosberg in Bahrain, but after Rosberg struggled with his set-up in Melbourne on Friday, team principal Ross Brawn hinted that Schumacher might have the upper hand.

"We made some progress on Michael's side and he was fairly happy with the car," he said. "Nico was not quite so happy and we may have gone the wrong way on some changes so there is still some work to do on the set-up of his car."

However, Rosberg is confident his problems will be solved with a bit of hard work ahead of Saturday's qualifying.

"The first session was ok this morning and we learnt some good things," Rosberg said. "This afternoon was a bit frustrating with the weather interruptions but we were still able to learn a good amount on the tyres which gives us some preparation for tomorrow. There are still some set-up issues to look at and improvements to make on the car so we have plenty of work to do overnight."

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