Fernando Alonso may have missed out on Q3 for the first time this season but the Spanish ace says he is confident Ferrari will gain more points today than their rivals, Lotus and Mercedes, for the runner-up spot in the constructors’ championship.
Alonso will start the race today from P10 on the grid but claims he’s been performing better on Sundays in most weekends and is not putting too much weight on Saturday’s disappointing performance.
Last year, the Spaniard won in Valencia starting from P11 and although he doesn’t expect a similar outcome today, he insists he’ll do everything to outpace his rivals to get the points.
“In Valencia I was completely surprised to start in 11th and win the race, if we win the race here we’ll be even more surprised but who knows?” said Alonso.
“I think we need to be realistic, we need to start the race thinking it will be tough. I don’t know what is the goal we can achieve, this is a question mark, not just for us, but I’m still confident that we’ll score some good points and more points than our competitors. We need to be very concentrated, we need to attack all the race and recover positions. We want to finish in the best position possible.”
Fellow Ferrari driver, Felipe Massa will start from P7 and the Brazilian has now out-qualified Alonso for the sixth time in the past seven races.
– Bits from the pits II: Sport360's inside track at Abu Dhabi GP
But while Alonso concedes to his ongoing troubles in qualifying, he says it’s important to look at the big picture which shows that the two-time world champion is second in the drivers’ standings while Massa is down in eighth place.
“I think we need to see at the end of the weekend how everything goes,” added Alonso. “To take a look only on qualifying is a bit difficult.
“The last four races before India, three of them Felipe was ahead of me in qualifying and here will be now four or five. But in the past five races I finished in front. Look at the points, I have 207 and he has 90-something (102).
“This is Formula One. Saturdays are good for the show, good for people to keep talking but at the end of the day the points are on Sundays.
"There are different strategies, different determination to prioritise something in the weekend and apart from that this circuit is a little bit also, for whatever reason, that way. (Mark) Webber in front of Sebastian (Vettel), Nico (Rosberg) in front of (Lewis) Hamilton, there are some surprises.”
Alonso explains how the car is clearly not competitive enough but says no drastic changes will be made for today’s race nor the last two of the season in the United States and Brazil.
“All the teams are committed to 2014 now, I don’t think any team is thinking about the remaining races,” said the 32-year-old Spaniard.
“The problem we are facing is that we’re not very competitive but we weren’t competitive in July, August or September but we still had five podiums, including three consecutive second places in Spa, Monza and Singapore.
“So this masked a little bit the problems that we were having and now we’re back to reality.”
* For breaking news, follow us on @Sport_360 or find us on Facebook.
