Tag Archives: Alonso

Fernando Alonso admits that he’s fortunate to be starting as high as fourth in Austria – but he insists that Ferrari has also made genuine progress with its recent updates.

Fourth represents Alonso’s best dry qualifying position to date with the F14 T.

“Definitely it was not a normal qualifying,” said Alonso. “Probably we took advantage of it because it’s not normal to see Hamilton behind us, for example. We need to be proud of the position. Definitely the new parts we brought in Canada and here, they seem to work fine. In Canada we felt more potential in the car, but for whatever reason, the track or the layout or whatever was not good for us, and we didn’t have a good race.

“But the new parts were better than the old ones, so that was a positive sign. Here again we tested some others and they seemed to be also positive, so hopefully we are moving in the right direction. We know there’s still a long way to go.

“As I said the qualifying, we need to be calm about the result, because we were 1.1 seconds behind the Mercedes this morning and in some practice, now we have one Mercedes one tenth [ahead] and one Mercedes behind, so I don’t think everybody used their full potential, because conditions were a little bit tricky.”

Alonso admits he expects to face pressure from behind, and not just from Lewis Hamilton, who is back in ninth: “I expect Ricciardo and Vettel – with all the new tyres he has now – to have a strong race. So it’s going to be difficult to keep the fourth.”

Fernando Alonso says he’s not surprised to have qualified only seventh in Canada, despite Friday suggesting that Ferrari was in the mix with Red Bull and Williams.

“Obviously we always hope for the best and try to improve race by race,” said Alonso. “But to be honest also in the seven races of the championship we’ve been constantly in the top three on Friday, and we’ve never been in the top three in qualifying, so we know that our way to approach the weekend is a little bit different on Fridays, and we knew that it was going to be tough on qualifying. It is true that Red Bull and Williams, they’ve been surprisingly good on this circuit, and we were not fast enough.”

Alonso says he hopes to use strategy to take the fight to the cars immediately ahead.

“Probably the best thing is to study the temperatures and see which tyres work better with these temperature. Yesterday it seemed quite clear the soft was the tyre for the race, but today with the hotter temperatures the supersoft is performing quite well, so if that is the case tomorrow, we may switch to the supersoft in a race situation, and try to add one extra pitstop. But we need to do something because we need to finish in front of them.”

Fernando Alonso says that Ferrari should not compromise next season by getting too bogged down with improving this year’s car.

Although there are no rule changes, and thus in theory any 2014 development carries over, Alonso stressed there is a bigger picture.

“We need to keep fighting for important goals and we have targets to achieve this year,” he said. “However we must not compromise next year’s project this year. We need to keep developing in 2014, because many things carry over for the following year. But if there is something fundamental for next year, obviously we mustn’t take any time away from that. I am not worried about this.”

He also praised his new boss: “Since Marco Mattiacci arrived, everything is moving in the right direction. He has good vision and a very clever approach and we are going to be stronger and stronger.”

Meanwhile Alonso said that Montreal won’t be easy for Ferrari, but he’s confident of scoring points.

“It’s going to be tough on a track where once again the dominant factor is the power effect, not like Monaco or Barcelona. It’s not going to be easy but I like the track and we have performed well here over the past four years, so I expect to have a good weekend, scoring good points.

“We have some updates that we have been working on for some weeks, testing them in the simulator. It’s a short lap so the times will be very close which means that one or two tenths can equate to six or seven positions.”

Fernando Alonso gave the Spanish crowd something to cheer on Sunday when he chased down and passed team mate Kimi Raikkonen to finish sixth, but the result was far below the expectations of both the former champion and his fans.

Alonso, who ran a three-stop strategy, was 87 seconds behind winner Lewis Hamilton at the flag.

“Obviously we would like to be first and second, but we were not quick enough today,” he said afterwards. “In fact they nearly lapped us, so that’s not what we want. But at least we had some action and we put some show at the last moment for the fans.”

Alonso admits it won’t be easy to make progress.

“It’s going to be tough. We said on Thursday that the China podium was a little bit of a combination of things that helped us, and we were not in a position to fight for a podium. Today we confirmed unfortunately that feeling, and we need to raise our game. We are not quick enough at the moment. Everyone seems to bring some new parts to the races, and we’re struggling to catch up. We need to bring some next time.”

Regarding the need to focus on aerodynamics or the power unit, he said: “Both, we need to work all areas. I don’t think there is only one part that we need to improve and that’s it. We need to be more efficient, and we need to have better aero performance, we need to have better power. So many things to do.”

Fernando Alonso insists that Ferrari did a “perfect job” in Bahrain with the car it currently has – but he acknowledges that the team is not performing at a high enough level.

Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen could manage only ninth and 10th places, having struggled with lack of straightline speed when fighting other cars.

“It was tough, no doubt,” said Alonso. “We would like to do better than what we did today. We will have better Sundays, for sure. On the other hand I think the team did a perfect job. We solved the problem we had yesterday, we changed a few parts, we were not sure which one was the cause of the power loss of yesterday.

“The car was performing at its maximum today. The start was great, the strategy was good, the pit stops were good, so I think we maximised what we had in our hands.

“This was thanks to a good job, but on the other hand we know we are not competitive at the moment, we’re struggling a little bit, especially with top speed, and when you start at the back and you need to battle that is a benefit.”

Alonso still refuses to accept that Mercedes cannot be caught.

“They are strong, no doubt, but we’re still thinking that we can catch up. Why not? It’s only the third race in the championship, a long way to go. We saw also Brawn GP winning the first five or six races that year [2009] and Red Bull at the end of the year nearly caught up with them. We need to work, it’s not time to talk, it’s not time to make excuses, we are not good enough and we will do better.

“It’s not going to be easy, we know that. There are a couple of things in plan, there is also not the power itself, it’s also the aerodynamic efficiency we can improve. We will work day and night, starting from this week, we have two days testing in Bahrain. Hopefully in China we’ll see the first step.”

Fernando Alonso says he was hampered by a loss of straight line performance over the course of qualifying in Bahrain, a handicap that led to him finishing Q3 in a lowly 10th place.

He will start ninth however, as Daniel Ricciardo has a 10-place penalty.

“I was losing power throughout the qualifying,” said Alonso. “So every run I was going out the car felt slower and slower on the straights. In Q2 I did 34.5s, in Q3 with less fuel and better track conditions I did 34.9s. Unfortunately when it counts we didn’t have the package available. We need to look, is it something damaged in the aerodynamics or the floor or whatever that makes the car slower? Or something in the power unit?

“Sometimes there are some software tweaks or something, it’s enough, or some changes on the steering wheel. We need to check if we did something during the qualifying. It just seemed to lose power slowly.”

Alonso remains optimistic for the race: “We start ninth with the Ricciardo penalty, so we start on the clean side. We need to have a good start and a good strategy if we want to recover. People around us are very fast, Hulkenberg starting behind, Vettel. We must look at the front, and also strong people at the rear. We need to have an aggressive race. We have nothing to lose – we are nearly out of the points already, so we must improve.”

Fernando Alonso repaid the hard work of the Ferrari mechanics by earning fourth place on the Malaysian grid after a collision with Daniil Kvyat in Q2.

Alonso suffered left front suspension damage, but the team managed to replace the broken part and get him out shortly after the session restarted.

“I think we had a chaotic qualifying like always in the rain situations,” said Alonso. “And we added a little bit more from our side in this one with the incident with the Toro Rosso, so it added a bit more stress into the qualifying. The mechanics did a super job, I think it’s a world record of changing suspension in three minutes, and I was able to keep running.

“The car really felt very strange, I think the toe or something was a little bit crazy after the crash, because it was so light on the right corners and so heavy on the left corners that I could not even move with the two hands. It was difficult, but enough to complete the laps, and I think staring fourth should give us a little bit of a possibility or a window to think of the podium for tomorrow.”

Alonso said he didn’t blame Kvyat for the incident.

“I don’t blame him, I think it was 50:50 probably, because I didn’t see him, that’s the truth, and I turned and only felt a touch, the crash, I didn’t even see him before the movement of the car. Out lap, you probably need to take it a little bit easier, but I think it’s 50:50 and I was lucky to run again. I think he ran again also, so that was the best news.”

Fernando Alonso had his first run the Ferrari F14 T at Jerez today, and the Spaniard pronounced himself happy with progress so far.

He focussed on aero mapping in the morning, before turning his attention to set-up in the afternoon. He completed 58 laps, recording a time that was 2.2s off the best time of Kevin Magnussen.

“The car has been put on track three days ago, and we are in the very early stages of understanding the car,” said Alonso. “We need to make as many laps as possible these days, and in Bahrain as well, because every lap with all the changes that we have in the rules is very welcome, all the information that is coming.

“We discovered some potential problems, we discovered some new things. It was a good day today, going back to the steering wheel and driving in front of spectators and driving with a better feeling obviously than we have in the simulator. We have a couple of months with not driving these cars, and the simulator can give you an idea, but it’s never the same.”

Some drivers have stressed how different the cars are to drive this year, but intriguingly like his team mate Raikkonen, Fernando downplayed the changes.

“No big difference, to be honest. You jump in the car and there’s no big difference on driving style or big difference on how the things work this year. There is a lot of talk about these changes and regulations etc, but the driving style itself is not a big difference compared with what we were doing last year.

“There are some parameters to control more than last year, but at the end of the day I think we will get used to it very quickly. We have to manage one battery, it’s the same as last year, it’s just bigger because it does multifunction things, last year it was only for the KERS. But in terms of driving input I don’t think it will be a big difference, driving a 2014 car.”