Schumacher: We are going backwards.

Normally seen as one of the people on the grid who will always look for the positives from a race, world champion Michael Schumacher wasn't pulling any punches after a disappointing British Grand Prix for Ferrari.

Neither Schumacher or Rubens Barrichello was on the pace at Silverstone, with the two Ferraris over a minute off the pace in sixth and seventh place - something Schumacher admitted wasn't good enough.

"Of course, I cannot be happy to have finished sixth, especially looking at my lap times in the race," he said. "Clearly, we are simply not fast enough at the moment. If I had not been delayed by Trulli, I might have been able to fight with Button, but I am not keen on using the word 'if' as an excuse.

"If you compare our performance from the two North American races to these last two, we appear to be going backwards instead of forwards. We are not up to the level of our competitors. I am still looking forward to my home race in Hockenheim, but I wish I could promise the fans there a bit more than this."

Barrichello adopted a three stop strategy compare to the two stop strategy used by Schumacher but it failed to help the Brazilian, who felt he wasn't helped by being held up by the BAR of Jenson Button.

"This was quite a difficult race," he said. "Basically, we did not have the pace which we thought we might have. I made a good start and I knew I had to pass Trulli at this point if my race was going to go to plan. It was all going pretty smoothly apart from the fact I was held up by Button which cost me time. This meant that the three stop strategy I had adopted did not work out the way it should have done.

I had some brake problems, as at Magny-Cours, but seeing how the race evolved, I don't think I could have done much better."

Like Schumacher, team boss Jean Todt wasn't pulling any punches after the race - admitting that the reliability shown by getting both cars to the finish was the only satisfying part of the afternoon.

"I said yesterday that we could expect a difficult race and that getting both our cars home in the points was our only realistic target," he said. "Unfortunately, that is how things turned out. We are not capable of matching the pace of the leaders and the final result is a reasonably accurate reflection of the current pecking order here at Silverstone today.

"The only satisfying point to take away from here is the level of reliability we demonstrated this afternoon."