Tag Archives: Ferrari

Fernando Alonso insists that he extracted the maximum out of the Ferrari F14 T at Monza after landing seventh place, behind six Mercedes-powered cars.

Alonso was sixth on the speed trap list, and it’s clear that Ferrari has gone for less downforce than some rivals, and thus sacrificed some performance in the corners.

“It was a nice session for me, I think,” he said. “It’s difficult after the free practice, always we create some optimism because we seem to be always a little bit more competitive, probably we run different fuel loads compared to our opponents. In qualifying we know that they turn up the engine probably, and they are a little bit quicker than us normally, so we expect a tough qualifying. And it was a tough qualifying.

“But I was completely on the limit today. I had two runs in Q2 and two runs in Q3, and I did four identical lap times. They could put 100 sets of tyres and I would identical timed laps, so it was absolutely the maximum. It was positive for me because as I said see two Mercedes, two Williams, two McLarens, one Ferrari, two Red Bulls, so personally I think I struck the maximum. The important thing is to do tomorrow a good race.”

Regarding his prospects he said: “We need the points, we need to help the team, we need to give some satisfaction to our tifosi as well. Today we could not fight for pole position unfortunately, and tomorrow they will expect from us the maximum, and that maximum is to have a perfect race. We have to balance this, an attacking race plus finishing the race with good points to help the team, that is what they expect from us.”

Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen will start the British GP from 19th and 20th positions after Ferrari reacted too late to changing conditions in Q1.

The Italian team was slow to follow the general move to slick tyres, and by the time the red cars did switch over the rain had returned, and Alonso spun off on his one lap.

“We know that two Williams and two Ferraris were out of Q1, so definitely we did something wrong compared to other teams,” said Alonso. “Because when both cars are out of one session like this, when you are out at the wrong moment with the wrong tyre, that’s definitely something that we need to look at. It’s true that it’s happened some other times, and we saved, many times by luck – I remember being on pole position in 2012 here, and in Q2 I [had] passed 10 seconds before the chequered flag and we did a lap in very wet conditions. It’s something we need to look at, something we need to improve.

“But at the same time, it’s a very narrow line. If when everyone put the dry tyres the spots of rain that hit us in our lap came two minutes earlier, that no one can predict, these people would be in the wall now. They will crash, we would be in Q2, and people would say why did you put the dry tyres when the track is still wet. Now it’s easy to say why did you put the dry tyres when the track was wet in our case. We need to do better next time.”

Alonso acknowledged that sometimes the decision making process in bigger teams created situation’s like today’s.

“I think the bigger teams, they have longer procedures than smaller teams, so we need to speed up some of the communications and some of the things that we do.

“I definitely agree that there were some cars on dry tyres today a couple of minutes before us doing green sectors and we were in the garage. That’s something that we need to improve for next time.”

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.”