Saturday: Ferrari couldn’t do better
The Ferrari drivers achieved the qualification they were expecting, given the performance level of their car since the start of the weekend. Felipe Massa is thrilled to have outpaced his teammate Fernando Alonso. The Brazilian will start 5th, and the Spaniard 8th.
Fernando Alonso – 5th and 8th:
« We more or less expected this result since we haven’t had a great pace throughout the weekend, always ranked between 6th and 10th place. Even in Q3, I couldn’t do better. Here, the long runs went better in terms of degradation than in Korea, and this gives us hope to catch up tomorrow. Tomorrow, we’ll do our best, as always, to try to score many points during the start, with the strategy and our management of tire degradation. Our goal is not only to finish in the top 8 to keep our championship hopes alive because if Vettel doesn’t win here, he’ll do so in another upcoming race when the number of combinations that can affect the result will be fewer. Now, we need to score points for our second place in the constructors’ championship. For this, we need to finish ahead of Mercedes, who are only one point behind us. »
Felipe Massa – 6th and 5th:
Being able to do a perfect lap on this incredible track is extremely satisfying and it reminds me of one of my poles here in 2006. Even though it’s a 5th place, it’s a good position for tomorrow. Already yesterday, I could feel that the car was very well balanced and today, we did a good job by managing to extract all the potential. Doing better wasn’t possible but I am still very happy. Obviously, tomorrow’s race won’t be easy because there are some very fast cars ahead of us but we can be in the race and we must focus as much as possible on strategy and tire management. Achieving a good result will heavily depend on our pace. Last year, I finished second here and tonight, I’ll try to remember how I did that.
