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Alonso: Ferrari still has big gap to close

Written by admin on . Posted in F1news

Fernando Alonso believes Ferrari still needs to improve its F138, despite qualifying third for the Chinese Grand Prix, after mixed results with its Shanghai upgrades.

The Spaniard took third, 0.3 seconds behind polesitter Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes, and outqualified team-mate Felipe Massa for the first time this season.

Alonso believes the squad has made progress, but thinks more needs to be done in terms of qualifying speed.

“On Friday you try some new parts – some work as expected and you keep for rest of weekend, some of them do not work as expected and are maybe worse than previous, so you remove them,” he said.

“We got some new parts here. Some of them are positive, some of them were not so positive, so we need to keep working on that if we want the pace of the leaders, especially in qualifying.”

Alonso nevertheless believes Ferrari can still be a threat in the races.

“Our Sunday pace is good and I don’t see any change here,” he added.

“We have not been easiest on tyres to be honest. The softs degrade much more and will last not too long, but on the long runs we did, nothing was surprising us.

“Hopefully we can have a good race, a clean race and be on podium at the end and fighting for the win.

“We will need to be flexible and clever with the strategy.”

This is a syndicated post, which originally appeared at F1 news – AUTOSPORT.com.