Sunday: Hard Return to Earth for Ferrari

Fernando Alonso – 5th

The best moment of the race was obviously the start. We’ve worked so much in this area that you could see the result. It was fantastic to see the crowd cheering in the stands. I tried to do my best, keeping the fastest behind me for nearly 20 laps, but after that, there was nothing I could do. It was stressful to see them in my mirrors all the time, and we tried as much as possible to copy and anticipate their every move. This meant spending half the race on hard tires, which penalized us severely and made the gap seem larger than it actually was.

We lack aerodynamic support: we didn’t have the wing that matched the track here. We need to carefully analyze the behavior of all the modifications we’ve made here and understand why, in two weeks, we’ve lost time to Red Bull and McLaren.

Now, we are heading straight to Monaco for a special race. Anything can happen there. Of course, we know that the aerodynamic downforce required for this track is the strongest of the entire season, but that was also the case last year and we were competitive. I have definitely not given up on the title, just after five races: the gap in the standings is really big but anything can still happen, I am sure of it.

Felipe Massa – Retirement

« Towards the end of the race, I could no longer select gears and had to stop on the roadside: it was the crazy end to a bad weekend. Fortunately, we won’t have to wait, with the Monaco race, which is somewhat a second home race for me since I live in the Principality.

Fortunately, we also won’t have the hard tires we had today, which really didn’t work for us. When we switched from softs to hards, we started to suffer more and more: there was no grip and I was struggling to keep the car on track.

Thanks to the strategy, we managed to pass the Mercedes and Petrov’s Renault, but it all came to nothing. We don’t have enough aerodynamic support to make the hard tires work properly as we have seen in other races, but here it was even more problematic.

Pat Fry

« Yesterday, a fantastic lap by Fernando allowed us to be on one of the front two rows for the first time. Today, the Spaniard did it again with an incredible start that propelled him to the front and placed him in a position well beyond the goals our package is worth. With the soft tires, we could keep the best behind us, but then, with the hard ones, we didn’t stand a chance and could only think about defending our position.

Here, Red Bull and McLaren were clearly faster than us, and it was only thanks to Fernando’s talent that we were able to hold them off in the first half of the race. We don’t have enough aerodynamic downforce for this circuit, and it was noticeable from the start of the weekend, but we clearly didn’t expect to be so far off the pace in the race. There are many things to do to make the car competitive: we’ve made a step forward, but it hasn’t been enough to allow us to fight to the end for the top positions.

From a strategic point of view, I think we made the right choice […].