Fernando Alonso: “I don’t expect any big surprises”

Fernando Alonso stressed today that his Malaysian GP win won’t make any difference to the status quo in China this weekend.

He expects Shanghai to be a difficult event for Ferrari, whose car has been struggling for pace in normal conditions, and suggested that he might not make Q3.

“Nothing changed,” said the Spaniard. “I think it’s going to be a tough weekend for us again. I don’t expect any big surprises as we’ve been saying, the team and myself, all week, the car has some small improvements, nothing big for this race and I think it’s the same, more or less, for all the other teams around us in the paddock.

“So I expect more or less the positions to maintain, or to keep the same as the first two races, which means a difficult to weekend for us. Struggling to be in Q3, I guess, in qualifying and then in the race to score as many points as possible as we did in the first races – trying to do a good strategy, a good management of the tyres and a little bit of luck. It’s always a factor that we always seem to forget is there.”

Alonso said it was impossible to guarantee that planned future upgrades would make a major difference.

“No big improvements for this race and as I said, we’re working, we’re working on the car and I think we cannot say that for Barcelona there will be a big improvement because we don’t know. We are working day and night to do the work and to improve the car and I think we have some new parts for the car which we need to test tomorrow – maybe they are working fine, maybe they are not working and we need to come back with those parts.

“In Barcelona there will be more new parts which I’m hoping for. We need to test to see if they are working fine. As I said, Formula One these days doesn’t have a magic button where we change something, we arrive in China, we arrive in Barcelona, in Canada and you change one part on the car and you improve by one second.

“This will be constant work from the team, improving one tenth, two tenths, three tenths every step that we do and we need to do it quicker than the others because all the other teams will bring a couple tenths (advantage) to every race so we need to bring some more.”

He conceded that another wet weekend might not be bad for Ferrari: “It can be a very good weekend for you or very bad because it’s a little bit of gamble in the rain. Anything can happen. You can be with the right tyre in the right moment or completely the wrong tyre in the wrong moment, so this is what happens in wet races. As I said, with a normal race we know our possibilities, we know our limitations at the moment, which is not quick enough.

“So in a wet race, we can lose a couple of points or we can win a lot more. Maybe this risk of a wet race can be good for us at the moment because in normal conditions we are not as fast as we expected.”