Fernando Alonso gave McLaren an unexpected vote of support today after Lewis Hamilton topped the afternoon session in Abu Dhabi.
For obvious reasons it suits Alonso to have Hamilton in the mix and potentially taking points of the Red Bulls. Fernando himself finished the second session in third, albeit just 0.001s ahead of Mark Webber.
“I don’t really care where Lewis is in the times today,” he said initially. “For us it was a good Friday, because we managed to do a lot of laps. We tested some set-up possibilities for tomorrow that we need to analyse today. Overall it was a good Friday in terms of time on the track, in terms of how competitive other people are. We know that Friday is not very representative, and for sure Red Bull are still favourites for tomorrow. Hopefully McLaren can do a good job here and be on pole, but I guess Red Bull wasn’t 100% today.”
Asked by this blog how the track had developed into the evening, Alonso said: “It did change. Especially in first practice it did improve a lot. It was wet or damp in the installation lap in some corners, and sure it did improve. And then they ran some other categories between the two sessions, and overall we ended up with a good level of grip. We expect some more to come tomorrow as usual, and better on Sunday. I think Bahrain, Korea, Singapore, here, every lap you do on the track you feel better and better grip. We need to think also on that in terms of set-up for tomorrow etc. We know the track will come to us.”
He acknowledged that the Bridgestone supersofts are a concern: “Probably the supersofts were having some high degradation today, which was more or less expected, because tyres are one step softer or even two steps softer than last year’s tyres. We expect some extra degradation this year, but there is some big evolution in this track from Friday to Sunday, so if it doesn’t rain tomorrow or Sunday, I think supersoft can be OK even in the race.”
Alonso insisted that he’s not feeling any stress.
“I’m still feeling good, very relaxed, yesterday and today. Sure tomorrow and Sunday will be more stressed, because you approach an important race. But I think all of the contenders at this point we have enough races, enough experience. We’ve been racing from go-karts all of us, 15 or 20 years ago. We know it’s an important race. At the end of the day it’s 25 points, the same as any of them. So we need to do a good weekend, a competitive lap tomorrow, a good start, good pit stop, and good race pace.”
Adam Cooper F1 