Still no luck for Ferrari.

In the past five years, one of the favourite ways to describe Michael Schumacher was 'lucky'. Not any more...

The German always seemed to come out of scrapes unharmed - the odd exception aside - and generally got the breaks with traffic, safety cars and reliability that his rivals craved as they attempted to stop him from romping to five straight world titles. This year, however, it is a different story, with the current state of the F2005 forcing Schumacher into situations where even his luck cannot come through.

The Monaco Grand Prix was a case in point and, just two weeks after suffering a double puncture in Barcelona, the German was forced to make an unplanned pit-stop to replace a broken nose wing on his car. Had Ferrari been its recent dominant self, Schumacher would surely have been running with the leaders, who escaped Christijan Albers' Mirabeau rotation unscathed, but, having been restricted to eight place in qualifying, the world champion was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong at the beginning of the race, " he lamented, "I got stuck behind the Minardi that blocked the track, and then I had to pit to change the nose on the car. It is clear when you look at the times that we had a very competitive race pace, so it is a shame that we were not able to get the most out of it."

There was a shred of good fortune for Schumacher, however, for he was able to rejoin the race after his nose change - the assailed David Coulthard was not so lucky - and went on to secure a couple of valuable points as tyre problems took their toll on the Michelin runners.

Team-mate Barrichello was no more fortunate, starting behind Schumacher and also getting caught up in the Mirabeau melee. On top of that, the Brazilian had the ill-luck to stall during his pit-stop - and then get caught speeding as he rejoined the race.

"All sorts of thing happened in this race," Barrichello admitted, "but I had a really good car. The tyres were excellent throughout and meant I had a good pace, but there is so little space to overtake here, I could not make the most of them. he most important thing we can take away from here is that the car was very good in the race."