Stefano Domenicali: “Our competitors are so strong…”

Ferrari team principal Stefano Domencali says his team has to keep its collective feet on the ground, despite scoring two consecutive wins.

Fernando Alonso has crept up the World Championship table over the past five races, but Domenicali insists that it’s impossible to predict how things will play out.

“It was good that we won this race because in terms of the points for the driver’s classification we did a step forward, this is what we wanted,” said Domenicali. “And now with four races to go the situation regarding the championship is very, very open. It’s a shame that yesterday we lost the second car and Felipe started from the last position, with the problem with the gearbox it was impossible to do better than what he did. He tried to do a strategy stopping on the first lap, and seeing if the safety car could reshuffle the cars, but unfortunately it came at the wrong moment for that strategy.

“I would say generally speaking it was a great result, a great performance. It’s good to see that the team is still focussed and concentrated, because we know that we have done nothing apart from winning a couple of races. But the championship is very far from the end.”

Domenicali didn’t want to make too many predictions about form in Japan and beyond, and stressed that from now on, it’s a mental game.

“I don’t know. Our competitors are so strong, it’s better to wait and see. For sure for us it’s important, and I said to my guys, to work very hard on reliability. We paid a big price this weekend as a team. The car seems to be better in terms of general performance, also on this kind of track. We will have some little updates, nothing major, but now I think a lot will be in the head of the drivers, in the heads of the people who have to work, and the reliability, rather than an incredible improvement in performance.

“We know that all the teams now are in a period where they have to switch to put all the resources into the new car, otherwise they will be very late in the end. I think it will be a very interesting end to the season for sure.”