Confident Alonso Eyes Title Bid at LinesMaker

Confident Alonso Eyes Title Bid

Alonso fin­ished third in the Turk­ish Grand Prix

Fer­nando Alonso says he is “con­vinced” he can mount a title chal­lenge as long as Fer­rari main­tain their upturn in form fol­low­ing the Turk­ish Grand Prix.

The Spaniard is 52 points — more than two wins — behind Red Bull’s Sebas­t­ian Vet­tel after four races.

But Alonso, runner-up to Vet­tel in 2010, said: “What mat­ters are results and we’ve started to make the podium.

“We must do that reg­u­larly and if so I’m con­vinced that we will again be able to fight for the title.”

Alonso was a strong third at the Turk­ish Grand Prix fol­low­ing a race-long bat­tle with Mark Web­ber, who ulti­mately held him off to secure a 1–2 fin­ish for Red Bull.

And Alonso made the point after the race that his even­tual deficit to Vet­tel, the win­ner, was about the same amount of time he lost being held up by Nico Rosberg’s Mer­cedes in the early laps.

He said on the Fer­rari web­site that he had spent time analysing his starts to the sea­son in 2010 and 2011.

“What came out of this lit­tle game was that com­pared to 2010 I’m eight points short [49 ver­sus 41] but in the same four races [Aus­tralia, Malaysia, China and Turkey] this year I’ve brought home 13 more points com­pared to last year [41 ver­sus 28],” he said.

“It’s true that my cur­rent gap to the top of the dri­vers’ cham­pi­onship is much greater [52 points] com­pared to what I had after Shang­hai 2010 [11 points] but I well recall that after Sil­ver­stone [last year] we were 47 points away and we only had eight races left.

“Today we still have 15 grands prix to come. This shows that you can look at the same thing in two dif­fer­ent, even com­pletely opposite ways.”

Fer­rari had a dis­ap­point­ing start to the sea­son, with their car lack­ing the pace of Red Bull or McLaren, who until Turkey had been Vettel’s clos­est pur­suers, with Lewis Hamil­ton the only man apart from Vet­tel to win a race this season.

Fer­rari blamed the prob­lems on issues with their wind-tunnel data and not push­ing hard enough with the design of their car.

They have since stepped up their devel­op­ment pro­gramme and have a raft of new parts to add to the car in the forthcoming races.

The first of them — new front and rear wings and brake ducts — were added in Turkey.

Although Alonso again qual­i­fied fifth, as he has for every race this year, his deficit to Vet­tel on pole was slashed from 1.4secs to 0.8secs.

In the race, Alonso gen­er­ally matched the lap times of Vet­tel and Web­ber, and passed the Aus­tralian for sec­ond place at one stage, before los­ing out in the clos­ing stages because Web­ber had fresher tyres.

“We took our first podium of the year,” Alonso said. “It was about time because we’d missed out on fin­ish­ing a race in the top three for too long, but what was espe­cially impor­tant was to fight for the top places until the end.

“That already hap­pened in China with Felipe [Massa] and in the two pre­vi­ous races we were also close to the podium: finally we have now achieved what we were capable of.

“Third place was also impor­tant for the morale of the team. We were all unhappy with a start to the sea­son that did not live up to expec­ta­tions and we know how much good it does to see that the efforts expended every day are paying off.

“But we cer­tainly can’t be happy with a third place and what mat­ters most is that we must be much more com­pet­i­tive in qualifying.

“If we always start from the third row or lower, it’s a strug­gle to fight for the podium.

“We have a lot of irons in the fire and we hope that as early as next week in Barcelona we will have new parts that allow us to take an impor­tant step for­ward in qual­i­fy­ing as well.”

Related Posts:

• Gene: Alonso Is Just Bet­ter Than Massa
• Fad­ing Title Hopes Worry Ferrari
• Over­tak­ing Not Too Easy — Alonso
• Sunday’s FIA Press Conference
• Alonso Leads Hamil­ton in Practice

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