Alonso: “Difficult weekend”

Fernando Alonso, starting 19th, knew it would be difficult for him to perform miracles. Despite everything, like his teammate Felipe Massa, he was able to patiently move up the peloton, rising to ninth place after his pit stop. Deprived of a clutch throughout the race, the Spaniard tried to overtake Jenson Button two laps from the finish but the Briton was able to defend his position, before Alonso?s engine gave up the ghost in a plume of smoke.

« It was a difficult weekend, comments Alonso. We made a big mistake in qualifying yesterday and today I retired with an engine problem. My race was a struggle from the start as I identified a gearbox problem at the start and then had to run without a clutch for almost the entire race. Trying to look on the positive side, we can say that the engine failure only cost me two points. It would have been much worse if I had been in the lead. »

« Looking at what happened the previous days, we could have expected it to rain. This is why we did a long first stint, as long as possible, but unfortunately it didn't rain. Today we gave a little gift to Red Bull : If we had had a normal qualifier, we would certainly have given them a lot of trouble. »

« I'm not concerned about my engine failure, concludes Alonso. Our engineers have sufficient experience to solve this problem. Considering everything that has happened, we can be proud of what we have achieved. We can be confident before the next Grand Prix, which we will try to win. »