Alonso feeling confident of competitiveness in cold China
Having arrived from the hot Malaysian weather Fernando Alonso was surprised by the cold conditions in Shanghai, China where it has been around ten degrees Celsius. The Ferrari driver heads into the Chinese GP with 37 points, two behind teammate Felipe Massa, and tied with Red Bull's Sebastien Vettel.
And like Massa, he is confident about his teams competitiveness after a few upgrades have been brought for their F10's.
Fernando Alonso commented in his blog at the Ferrari.com site, "It's really cold in China! I arrived here on Monday and you can't see anything of spring yet. It's not even ten degrees today and in the late morning it started raining non-stop. The weather should improve for the race weekend, but we've got to be ready for everything. It wouldn't be for the first time that the Chinese GP is held under variable weather conditions, just remember 2009 or 2007. I was at the track for a couple of hours, speaking to my engineers. We spoke about the situation and analysed the details of the data from Malaysia – Sunday night was just a quick summary – and the F10's development programme. We've got some new aerodynamic parts, which should improve our performance. But I also expect our main competitors to show up with updates, so it's impossible right now to say where we are: we'll discover that on Saturday afternoon in the qualifying. I've got confidence in our work. We've shown that we can be competitive on every kind of track, where we raced so far - during the races and at the test sessions in February. So there's no reason why it shouldn't be the same in China.
"The Shanghai circuit is very interesting. There are all kinds of corners and a long straight with a very tight right-hand corner at the end: there are always plenty of overtaking manoeuvres taking place here," he added.
"As usual the qualifying will be very important and we have to check the tyres' behaviour very carefully. They are the same we've been using in Australia and in Malaysia but with lower temperatures. We need to gain many points to conclude this first part of the Championship the best possible way, before we come to Europe. There will be a long break after Shanghai and the drivers and the teams can charge their batteries before the European races start. We'll all benefit from that, that's for sure!"
