World champion Michael Schumacher said here Saturday that the best he can hope for in Sunday`s Monaco Grand Prix is a fifth place finish after a disappointing qualifying session for Ferrari.
Schumacher, whose best finish this season was a second place in San Marino, finished down in 11th place in first qualifying and believes that will limit him despite claiming to have a strong race pace.
"We will try to get into the points and I think fifth place could be possible," said Schumacher. "In the race I think we are with the other teams, maybe not the fastest but we should be in there. But I have to say, this morning the gap was about eight tenths of a second so you would have expected that this afternoon would be similar and not nearly three seconds."
"To me that is not realistic because our race performance is not that bad. In the race I think we are quite okay. In the end we can only look forward. We now have to adapt our strategy and try to achieve the optimum."
Schumacher has had a difficult season and his Ferrari team are significantly behind championship leaders Renault and current challengers McLaren after the first six races of the season. This time last year Schumacher had won every race and, despite suffering a disappointing retirement here last year, he went on to win the next six races to charge into an unassailable lead in the title race.
This year he is already 34 points behind leader Fernando Alonso, who qualified second ahead of Sunday morning`s final qualifying session, and he had hoped to head to Monaco with a stronger package than he has.
"I have to admit coming here I was much more optimistic," said Schumacher. "I have to say we were too slow and everyone knows at the moment we have difficulties over that one lap in qualifying. Today there was also the fact I was one of the first cars on track. The track was very slippery at the beginning. Those two things came together in an extreme way today and it`s true the gap to the front is very big indeed."
Schumacher blamed the massive gap of around two-and-a-half seconds on the nature of the Monaco street circuit, which gets very slippery because of the many support races run on the Grand Prix weekend. He insisted things could still change, but admitted only bad weather would put him in with a chance of victory.
"In the end you never know what could happen and it could even rain tomorrow. If that happened, then everything will start again from scratch. We have seen over the weekend that it would be difficult today but here it makes a lot of difference if you have to go out early and I think that was the main reason. The track was extremely slippery because of the Porsche race and people walking on the track. That`s how I would explain a lot of the gap. Now we have to see what strategy is best for the race."
"This has obviously impacted on how fast we are in second qualifying but we have to look to the race and not second qualifying. Let`s just say I am not really happy, that much is clear."


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