Fernando Alonso believes that Ferrari has learnt from the mistakes Malaysian qualifying and that he has no concerns about the reliability of the team’s engine.
The double world champion encountered a disappointing weekend when he was eliminated in Q1, after the team wrongfully judged the weather conditions. This was followed by problems in the race, when the Spaniard’s F10 developed a gear box problem during the parade lap. Although Alonso managed to drive around this problem, his race was finally brought to an abrupt end when he was forced to retire with an engine problems two laps from the end.
“We had a very difficult weekend in Malaysia.” Alonso wrote in his blog on the Official Ferrari website, “It’s a pity, because we had very high expectations and as far as our performance level was concerned we had the confirmation that our expectations are justified.”
“We made a bad evaluation mistake in the qualifying and we paid for it in the race, where we also had reliability problems. Something like this can happen to anyone and we have to learn our lesson so we don’t repeat certain mistakes.”
“I’m not worried about the reliability. I think that what provoked the engine failure was a one-off and the team told me that there is no connection to the problems Sauber had and none to the anomalies we had before we changed the engines on Sunday in Bahrain. As far as the performance is concerned, we were also competitive in Malaysia.”
The Spaniard is also confident that Ferrari will be able to rediscover its form, next time out in China.
“We now have a week of preparations for the Chinese GP ahead of us.” he added.
“This is a good occasion for us drivers to charge the batteries, while the team will work on some new elements, which might be brought to China, making the car faster.
“I think that the F10 adapts itself very well to the Shanghai circuit’s characteristics and we can be optimistic. During the next races we have to try to get on the podium: being constantly amongst the top three means to be in a good position for the fight for the title.”
