Alonso: Ferrari must do even more than the others
After Ferrari's lackluster start to the season, a glimmer of hope appeared in China thanks to Fernando Alonso's third place. While significant progress allowed the Scuderia to claim its first podium of the season, the Spaniard urges his team to do even more to catch up.
Fernando Alonso’s performance at the Chinese Grand Prix was a real breath of fresh air for Scuderia Ferrari. Struggling with competitiveness since the start of the season, the F14-T had not yet allowed its drivers to climb onto a podium.
If Kimi Räikkönen still seems entangled in understanding his single-seater, his Spanish teammate was able to notice some progress behind the wheel, which was not a given according to his comments after the Shanghai race: « The car lacked performance in many areas. It wasn’t just one problem. We need to be more efficient, have better aerodynamics, better traction, better power. We lacked performance during the first three races. »
His third-place finish in China, ahead of the two Red Bulls, nevertheless demonstrated the overall progress made by his team on the F14-T: « In China, improvements didn’t happen in just one area, but a few here and there: more power, better software, we set everything up, made adjustments, and we had aerodynamic improvements. »
Despite everything, the work is not finished for the men in red. They will have to double their efforts to continue their progress and attempt to catch up, especially with Mercedes, as Alonso confirms: « We have a bigger margin for improvement because we started with little performance. But we must not dream too much, as the others will not be watching TV until Barcelona. Other teams will bring a lot of improvements there, so we have to bring some, and even more, if we want to catch up. This is the challenge we are facing now. We must not only develop our car at a normal pace, we must do so but even more. »
