Fernando Alonso says that Ferrari is having much more success at warming up the tyres in China, which should help with the team’s qualifying performance come Saturday.
Alonso lost some track time with hydraulic problems in the afternoon – caused by what the Spaniard called “experimental parts” – so his ultimate lap time was not representative, and he was well down the order.
“We did our normal Friday programme, with some new parts in the first session and some tyre work in the second one,” he said. “Tonight we will analyse everything, hopefully with some positive results, and we can keep moving.
“I think it was better here today. In Australia it was a problem with the warm-up, and even in Malaysia with the hard tyre the first lap was not the quickest. Here for whatever reason it was OK.
“I was weaving on the straight because I had a very slow out lap with some traffic at the beginning, so I let some cars go, and then I weaved a little bit. For Felipe and me we found better warm-up in the hard tyres, so that should be better for us in qualifying, and also in terms of the race.”
Alonso says it’s not a question of compromising race set-up to find qualifying speed, but more of simply making the car faster overall.
“What we need to do is to improve the car, and when the car is good, the qualifying will be good, then the race will be even better than now. We have to find some lap time in the car, some improvements, then the qualifying or the race pace come altogether when the car is quick. Everything become much easier, strategy works always fine.
“That’s the main priority for us, improve the car as quick as we can, bring in new parts every race and hopefully they work good enough. We know that all the teams will bring new parts as well, so we just have to bring more parts than them.”
PS: Apologies for lack of Twitter service this week, so far I have not been able to find a way to beat the Chinese censors. Any suggestions welcome via comments here!
Adam Cooper F1 