Schumacher confident of Canada boost

MONTREAL, June 11, 2011 (AFP) - Seven-times world champion Michael Schumacher put on a brave face Saturday after qualifying only eighth for Mercedes for Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix.

Schumacher, 42, who struggled to extract the best performance possible from his Pirelli tyres in the colder conditions, was surprisingly optimistic.

"I think we can be quite happy with today's qualifying. I had lost drive momentarily after turn four during my last lap, but otherwise I had a clean lap," said the German driver.

"We will have to analyse why that happened, but all went pretty well other than that.

"We have developed our set-up in the right direction over the weekend, and the long runs looked quite good this morning, so we should be OK in the race."

His team-mate and fellow-German Nico Rosberg qualified sixth."I'm pretty confident that we can do better in the race, certainly compared to our pace in Monaco," said Rosberg.

"We've put in a lot of work on race performance and I hope we can translate that tomorrow. It's good to have saved a set of new option tyres as well."