Schu happy with new wing

Michael Schumacher was pleased with the general Mercedes package after finishing fourth on the Friday timesheets in China. With his best lap of 1:35.602 being just nine thousandths of a second slower than third placed Jenson Button, Michael admits that results exceed pre-session expectations.

It was a strong day for Mercedes with, not just its works team and McLaren locking out the top four places, but Adrian Sutil also making the top ten in his Mercedes-powered Force India. For the 7-time World Champion, things are on the up although Schumacher was affected by a tyre problem on Friday.

Today's practice sessions went better than I had expected," he admitted. "The handling was pretty much okay and it seems that we have made a small step forward.

"We brought some improvements here, including the new rear wing, which have helped. So I am quite confident for the rest of the weekend, even if the overall ranking will not change much from the first three races.

"I was a bit unlucky this morning, as I had a puncture on my left-rear Prime (Hard compound) tyre, so we had to use one from the afternoon's allocation; that meant I only had three new tyres in the second session but it worked out fine in the end."

"We made good progress on the setup over the course of the day and tried some new directions, which all seemed to work okay," team-mate Nico Rosberg added. "I did lose a little bit of balance, with too much oversteer at the end of the afternoon, so we need to look into the reasons for that."