Alonso: Ready to fight

Today was much cooler than expected in the Sakhir paddock, as Fernando Alonso faced the media, with his first comments defending the sport from recent criticism.

“There will be some exciting races and some boring ones, just like in football, where you can see a terrible nil-nil game and the next one is an exciting 5-4 which you enjoy so much,” said the Ferrari man.

Next, he had to defend the Scuderia’s title aspirations.

“It would be extremely sad if I felt I would not be in the fight for the title in Abu Dhabi, as today is only the Thursday of the third race,” he affirmed. “I definitely think we can do a good job. It is early days for the development of the car and this year, instead of the usual half tenth performance increase, we are moving forward two tenths at a time. There is very good room to improve and become more competitive. No question, we think we will be in the fight in Abu Dhabi. We need to improve in all areas. We will try to do better, there have only been two races, so there’s a long way to go and we are ready to fight.”

While calling for patience regarding the state of the show, Fernando did admit he would like the cars in general to be faster.

“Driving these cars is still exciting because you are competing against others and that’s the DNA of a driver, we enjoy driving karts at 50 km/h on very hard tyres, sliding everywhere,” said the Spaniard. “You keep enjoying the competition but for drivers like me, Kimi or Jenson who were around before that, you miss the quicker cars. The cars are much less physically demanding. In the past, Malaysia required a specific training programme, but this year I told the team I didn’t even need a drinks system. The cars are still hard to drive, as they slide more and we have more switches to manage all through the race, which makes it more complicated. However, it’s interesting how F1 has developed over the 14 years I’ve been racing.”