Saturday: No Miracle for Ferrari

Fernando Alonso – 5th and 5th

I am not surprised by these qualifications because, in terms of pure performance, Saturday is always difficult for us and it will be like this until the end of the season. Usually, things go better on Sunday and our goal is to always be on the podium, as has happened in recent races. This weekend seems more difficult than usual because up until now we had a good race pace, but both yesterday and today we have struggled on long stints, which means we absolutely need to improve by tomorrow. We have some tire issues that we cannot manage as well as others: there is a lot of graining and if you push hard in the first sector, you almost risk not being able to finish the lap. We are going to need to find the right compromise to allow them to survive the number of laps proposed by our engineers because the ideal strategy is always two stops. Given our pace in the dry, the rain could mix things up. We have nothing to lose and even if we will have little time to adapt, we must be ready for this possibility.

Felipe Massa – 7th and 6th

I can’t be happy with this result in qualifying since I expected to be closer to our rivals than in Singapore. But that wasn’t the case because here too, both Red Bull and Mercedes are much faster, and we haven’t been able to get the most out of the car. Tomorrow, I hope to be more competitive, even though it won’t be an easy race. The degradation of the super softs on our car is quite high while other cars suffer less. Depending on how the first stint goes, we will have to decide if we need to switch to the mediums, which currently seems to be the best choice. Besides the Red Bulls, Mercedes, and a Lotus in front of us, we need to be very cautious with the other cars that are very close, and it will be very important to get a really good start, attack to the maximum to bring back a reasonable number of points. It will really take a lot of luck to be on the podium.