Michael Schumacher enjoyed a strong run on his 300th Grand Prix at Spa today. The seven times champion benefitted from the start carnage to fight at the front for a time before finishing in seventh place. Meanwhile, Nico Rosberg just missed out on points in eleventh after starting twenty-third on the grid.
Schumacher had for a time ran as high as second place in early proceedings, before it turned out that a one stop strategy was not the right way to go and he duly fell back as his tyres faded. He made a final stop late on and was still able to finish in the points on a difficult weekend for Mercedes.
“I quite enjoyed my 300th race, and it was good fun out there with all the battles. In the end, you have to be realistic, and getting into the points from where I started is not too bad, even if you obviously hope for more when I was second at one stage. But then, it was more than we had expected,” he said.
“It looked pretty reasonable at the start, and we were following our one-stop strategy. In the end though, it did not quite work out so we decided to go for fresh tyres and attack with them. If we had not done that, I might have ended up further back. But then I lost sixth gear and there was no way to attack. We will now have to do that next week in Monza.”
“It’s been an eventful but disappointing weekend for us, and it’s a shame to have finished just one place outside of the points today. Without the gearbox change and penalty, I probably could have scored some decent points this weekend,” Rosberg added.
“I had a good start today and moved up ten positions into the midfield. We were running a one-stop-strategy because I needed to take the risk to move up but it didn’t work out and we had to come in again quite late on. Now I’m looking forward to Monza and we will push hard for a better result there next weekend.”
“It was a very exciting race for Michael, and a great demonstration of his skills in his 300th Grand Prix. Unfortunately we didn’t quite have a quick enough car today to be pushing for the podium. Michael also had a problem with his gearbox towards the end which prevented him from challenging after his second stop. Nico made a strong effort to get into the points and almost succeeded. However with a lack of dry running, and the car not quite set up as he wanted, that was always going to be tough,” Ross Brawn concluded.
“We will look ahead now to Monza and keep working hard to improve our performance.”
