Alonso: "Rain will make it a more stressful weekend"

Noise from torrential rain hitting the roof of the Scuderia Ferrari hospitality unit here at the Sepang track almost drowned out the words of Fernando Alonso when he faced the media for the first time this weekend. The first topic was a look back at events in Australia a fortnight ago.

“We carried out investigations and we now understand what happened in terms of our performance in Melbourne and where we have to work,” began Fernando. “It’s true we need to improve the car, but we should also see how the next two or three races go, to see if the situation we experienced in Melbourne was the real thing, as the circuit there has unique characteristics and a special layout, so performances you see there are not repeated during the rest of the season. From our side, we believe we can be much more competitive and we will start by trying to have a better weekend here in Malaysia. I did not go to Melbourne expecting anything in particular, because from winter testing you can never be really sure what the situation is. However, we did expect to be fighting for pole and fighting for the win and that was not the case, so we were disappointed with our performance.”

There was plenty of talk about Ferrari’s lack of pace being related to tyre performance, but the Spaniard dismissed this notion. “I am not a fan of saying the car performance was poor because the tyres did not work properly. It’s simple, if your car works properly, then it has to be good with soft tyres or hard ones, in cold conditions and in hot. Having said that, maybe the fact that race day was a warmer sunnier day had something to do with the fact we had a better pace on Sunday than on Saturday. In the race, we were fighting with Button and Webber, something that seemed very far away on Saturday.”

Asked what was the most important factor to do better this weekend, Fernando began by repeating that the Melbourne result was not so bad. “Everyone is saying it was a disaster, but I disagree: we came fourth and finished ahead of Button and Webber. If we want to do better here and get on the podium, we have to do a better job and, as at every track, the most important thing is to have good balance in the car, especially here in Sepang, where like in Barcelona, you need downforce in the car produced by good aerodynamics. Tomorrow, we need to work to set up the car as well as possible and optimise the aerodynamics on the car.”

One cannot talk about Sepang without mentioning the weather and the prospect of rain storms seemingly timed to coincide with qualifying and the race! “Sure, the rain will make it a more stressful weekend,” agreed the Spaniard. “You need to be ready for all eventualities and it would be useful if the opportunity arose on Friday to try the extreme and intermediate rain tyres to see how they work and in any case, information gathered from running the tyres in high temperatures will also be useful as we never did this in winter testing. It could be an unknown situation and a very interesting one, but that’s nothing to worry about as it will be the same for everybody.”