Alonso: Improvements are paying off

After powering to third place in qualifying for tomorrow’s Canadian Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso said continual improvements to his Ferrari F2012 are beginning to pay off.

“The car felt quite good yesterday when we tested some new parts and we feel much more happy with the balance of the car and the grip of the car, Felipe and me,” said he Spaniard, who will start behind pole winner Sebastian Vettel and second-placed Lewis Hamilton. “Obviously, the world will never stop, for us or for the competitors, but at the moment we are extremely happy and thankful to the guys in the factory,

“It has been a very smooth weekend for us,” he added. “All the new parts work as expected. It’s our best [qualifying] position so far. We repeated what we did in Barcelona and there we got one important podium. In Monaco, on a completely different circuit we had a competitive car again and a good podium once more. And here on a completely different circuit – with long straights and chicanes – we are also competitive. This is a very good sign for us. It’s very good teamwork, because all the improvements we have been making on the car are really paying off now.”

Perhaps the mark of Ferrari’s resurgence is not Alonso’s position – the Spaniard has qualified inside the top ten in all but one race this season – but team-mate Felipe Massa’s sixth place start tomorrow.

The Brazilian failed to make Q3 in the opening five races of the campaign but in Monaco bounced back to a seventh-place grid spot and here in Montreal Massa insisted he could have bettered his sixth place but for a slight error.

“I am pleased with the progress made this weekend: starting from sixth is a positive result,” he said. “However, I can’t be happy with my last lap in Q3: in the second sector, I lost the rear end and that cost me a few tenths and that quite probably meant a few places on the grid. I’m very disappointed because I had the potential to do better than this sixth place.

“All things considered, I remain confident, because the whole team is moving forward which is very important for the rest of the season.”

Team principal Stefano Domenicali, meanwhile, pointed to the drivers’ ability to deal with the track characteristics of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve as further evidence of the team’s recent improvement.

“We are back to being in the hunt for pole and that is the most important fact,” he said. “It means that all our efforts to improve the performance of the car are bearing fruit. It’s all the more encouraging when one considers that this track actually highlights the very qualities that to date had been our weakest points, in other words traction and top speed. We have made a step forward, but it’s still not enough to be where we want. Now we will concentrate on what looks like being a very unpredictable race.”

Every the pragmatist however, Alonso said that this season qualifying performance has so far been no indicator of how a race will unfold.

“Races this year are very difficult to predict,” he said. “What we think on Saturday is normally not anywhere near what happens on Sunday. So we’ll see. It would be nice to win here, it’s a good circuit for Ferrari historically. Also, it’s Gilles Villeneuve’s anniversary, 30 years. So, it would be nice to offer all the Ferrari tifosi here in Canada a good result. But we know there are, at the moment, two guys quicker than us [Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton], as they proved today by doing a very good job, so tomorrow we need to do better if we want to win.