Mercedes suffered a disappointing day at their home race at Hockenheim yesterday.
Michael Schumacher lined up third on the grid following Mark Webber's penalty, but once again, the Silver Arrows were not as fast in the dry as they were in the wet.
The seven times champion made three stops during the race, and despite being the fastest man on circuit towards the end of the race, finished a disappointing seventh in front of his home crowd.
“There are nicer ways to finish a home race than falling back from third to seventh place. I squeezed everything I could out of the car but, unfortunately, that’s everything we could manage today. It’s a pity because I would have loved to have given something more to all our Mercedes-Benz colleagues who were supporting us today.
“Before this weekend, we expected to be racing between P5 and P7, and of course fifth place would have been the better option, but seventh was our maximum in these circumstances,” Schumacher said.
“I got a decent start and the short battle with Sebastian was fun. After that, unfortunately, there weren’t too many highlights, apart from setting the fastest lap, perhaps. However, we couldn’t maintain that pace for very long. Now we have to look forwards and do our maximum at the next race.”
Meanwhile, Nico Rosberg suffered his second disappointing race in a row, and was fortunate to finish in the points in tenth place. Rosberg was knocked out of Q2 and that, combined with a grid penalty for a gearbox change, meant he lined up a lowly twenty first on the grid.
“It feels ok to have scored one point today after such a bad qualifying yesterday and starting right at the back. We had a good strategy and I had great fun out there at times overtaking so many people to move from 21st to 10th place. Some of the guys I had to overtake a couple of times and there were some nice manoeuvres.”
“Thanks to our fans here in Hockenheim for their fantastic support, even though the weekend didn’t really run to plan. Now I look forward to Budapest in just seven days and hope for a better weekend, and we will keep working very hard towards this,” he added.
“We made the right decisions this afternoon but, after 67 laps, Michael found himself 29 seconds behind the winner. That shows we need to find more pace from the car,” Ross Brawn said.
