The
regret for a victory that slipped away had not
disappeared when the team awoke the day after the race. Those
still in Montreal and those already back home in Italy
all shared the same feeling: that Sunday afternoon was a
missed opportunity. At the same time, it is clear the
championship is still very open, especially the fight
for the Drivers’ title. If Alonso had won on Sunday,
which was a possibility, he would be leading the
classification.
Now however, there needs to be a step up in quality in
terms of performance, so as to be competitive at every
type of track, not just at those that suit the current
configuration of the F10, as was the case in Bahrain,
Monaco and Canada. With this in mind, at Maranello, the
work is going on practically day and night to be as well
prepared as possible for the Valencia race, an event
that will be very important in terms of setting a course
for the rest of the season. The European Grand Prix will
see the debut of a significant update package and then
others will follow in immediately at the next races.
From Valencia to the summer break, there are four grands
prix in six weeks and everything can still change.
Massa and Alonso both
left Canada on Sunday night and it’s easy to imagine
that neither man was in a particularly good mood. Felipe
seems to have a jinx at this Grand Prix, given that in
the last three of them he has never had a “normal” race.
On Sunday he showed he could have had a good a good
result given the pace he ran, but two collisions,
neither of them his fault relegated him to almost the
back of the pack. The penalty he got for speeding in the
pit lane, even if it did not affect the final result,
was a further blow.
It was a different
story for Fernando. His third podium with the Reds is
cause for satisfaction as it reverses the trend of two
races, Monaco and Turkey, where the points haul was
decidedly meagre, but the regret at the win slipping
away, mainly because of a few unlucky breaks, is still a
strong one. The Spaniard is definitely not the sort to
lose heart and the determination he showed in yesterday
afternoon’s team meeting after the race was the best
assurance that he will fight to the bitter end to
achieve the targets set at the start of the season.
The Montreal race
threw up some other positive elements including the fact
that in the eight races so far, the team’s performance
in the pit stops has always been very consistent, at the
highest level and yesterday, that was clearly seen with
Fernando getting the jump on Hamilton at the first stop.
With the ban on race refuelling, the mechanics can no
longer count on the time that used to be taken for
putting the fuel in the tank to do the wheel changes and
other possible eventualities – yesterday for example,
the nose on Felipe’s car had to be changed twice – and
their performance can win or lose a place. The fact that
the pit stop procedures have been at the highest level
is down to the work of the team these past few months,
both in terms of organisation of the procedure and the
development of new solutions like the traffic lights,
which are beginning to be copied down the pit lane.
Alonso – "We were back to normal in Montreal"
"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."
