Alonso confident that Ferrari can be on the podium again in Valencia

After a few difficult races for Scuderia Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso, the Spaniard was back on the podium at Monteal this weekend as he finished the Canadian GP in 3rd position. Alonso, who returned to Europe earlier this week, looks back on his race and is already looking forward to his second home race of the season at Valencia.

Fernando Alonso: "I’ve been back in Switzerland since yesterday morning already and I think that with the race having started at 12, lots of Formula 1 people made the most of it to get home quickly. A couple of days on from the race, the sense of disappointment that we missed out on a win that was within our grasp has been replaced with the awareness that we did actually get a great result. We have to look at it as a glass half full because, on the Thursday we would have been satisfied with the thought of a podium finish. We were competitive throughout the whole weekend, both in qualifying and the race, which is very positive. We were back to where we have been in practically all the other races, the one exception being Turkey, where for various reasons, everything about the Grand Prix went wrong, from every point of view. The normal situation is the one we have seen in Montreal, Monaco, Melbourne and Sakhir and all the other tracks where we fought for a podium finish. Maybe the results did not always match our potential, but I think the same can be said for all the top teams. In these first eight races of the season, all sorts of things happened – mistakes, reliability problems, bad luck – but we are still in the thick of the fight for both championships. The same can be said of McLaren and Red Bull, who have also missed out on points along the way.

"The Montreal race was very spectacular and incident packed, not just because of the nature of the track, but also because of the different strategies chosen by the teams, as a function of the tyre performance. I think the spectators at the track and those watching on television really enjoyed it, but I can assure you that for the drivers and the teams, it was a difficult and stressful weekend, because it was never really clear how the tyres would react in the various situations that arose.

"The next round is in Valencia in my home country. It will be nice to race in front of my fans and I would like to get on the podium again, given that Valencia is another circuit where I have never done so. We will have major updates on the F10 which I hope will allow us to up our performance level. Following on from that, we have further developments in the pipeline which should arrive for England and Germany: which is to say that the European Grand Prix is simply the ninth round of the championship, not a last ditch effort for Ferrari, which I heard some people saying. I don’t see how they can say that given that we have not even reached the halfway point of the season and that after Valencia there will still be ten Grands Prix to go. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now, this is a stage event and the final one of those stages will not come until November in Abu Dhabi. There is still a long way to go and things can change very quickly, going either one way or the other. People seem to have forgotten that last year, in the middle part of the season and in a car that was getting ever less competitive, Kimi was the driver who had scored the most points."