Fernando Alonso isn’t getting too excited about finishing Friday in Spain in fourth place, as he believes that the Red Bulls will be impossible to beat in normal circumstances this weekend.
Alonso was 0.8s off Sebastian Vettel, but less than a 0.1s shy of third placed Michael Schumacher. He said he was happy with the update package on the Ferrari, but insists it will take some luck for the RBR qualifying steamroller to be stopped.
“It’s just a day to check everything’s working in the car,” said Alonso after the session. “At the end I’m happy with the evolution, I’m happy with the updates in the car. But tomorrow we’ll see how the developments work and how close we can be to the Red Bulls.
“Regarding what they showed today in the second practice, they were very, very quick. I think it will be very difficult for all of us to arrive to those times. But we see some times good some good Fridays for some people, and then on Saturday, they’re struggling a little bit more.
“So fingers crossed, we can find something on our cars to be close to them, and hopefully they can do a mistake somewhere in the set-up or whatever, and we can close the gap. But in normal conditions we know it’s going to be difficult to beat them this weekend.”
Alonso admitted that the team had put more focus on running lighter fuel loads than it would normally do on a Friday.
“We did change the approach for the Grand Prix. We saw in the first races maybe we didn’t maximise the potential of the car in qualifying, so we divided the programme this afternoon, in half of the session doing race simulation and preparing the car for the race, and the other half of the session trying to be close to the qualifying performance.
“Hopefully overall we can learn some things, and tonight prepare the car for the race and for qualifying, while maybe at some other races maybe we concentrated too much on the race.”
Adam Cooper F1 