Alonso looks promising at Spa
2/9/2011
The rain was the big factor during the first free practice sessions at Spa, at which Fernando Alonso came in second behind Mark Webber.
Fernando Alonso finished second during the FP2 sessions at the Belgian Grand Prix. The Spanish driver was leading when driving on dry tires, but rain soon fell on the track, pushing the drivers to take refuge in the pits.
Fernando Alonso wound up the session with a time of 1:50.461, right behind Mark Webber (1:50.321). In the FP1 session Alonso came in 11th.
Alonso: “It’s a challenge to score a victory at Spa"
“There are five or six GPs on the calendar I have never won, and I think there are three where I have never made the podium, so I don’t have a trophy from them,” observed Alonso at his press conference after the Friday sessions.
“In years when you are vying for the World Championship you don’t care about that, but in years like 2011, in which we are 89 points from 1st place (Germany’s Sebastian Vettel, with Red Bull) you try to meet other challenges and you set different goals,” he explained. “And among those challenges, logically, is that of winning at Spa,” he added.
“What I like the most is the fluidness of the curves, of the design. There is no part of the circuit where you stop the car too much, with a series of slow or big curves requiring braking. Here it is all about maintaining your speed and letting the car go, things which have been lost a bit on modern racetracks. Today they all call for lots of acceleration and then slamming on the brakes,” he explained.
“Then there is Eau Rouge, and the feeling you get in your body there of compression when you’re down, at a height where you can’t see anything, you’re looking at just the sky for a second at three hundred and something per hour, and suddenly you’re up there and the real straightaway begins… those are sensations which you don’t have on other tracks,” the Ferrari driver observed during his analysis of the race.
“These have been, once again, training sessions where it’s been difficult to gauge things. This makes four or five weekends on which Fridays have been half wet, half dry. And it’s been a month of July in which the temperatures have been at 15 or 16 degrees. Now we come to Spa and we get rain again, and 15 degrees. These conditions are the worst for Ferrari, by far,” Alonso stated.
“We haven’t had much luck in the latest Grand Prix, but in terms of the World Championship it is a tough race, with changes in the weather and track, etc. For those of us who are chasing Vettel it can turn out really well, and we can win the race, or very badly and we will lose a bit, because we’re already way back,” he noted.
Credit: Fernando Alonso (www.fernandoalonso.com)
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