Although the momentum is clearly on Red Bull's and Sebastian Vettel's side for the time being, the Spaniard is trustful that his own team will strike back. A big step forward was managed by Ferrari in Turkey, where the Scuderia showed they are ready to challenge McLaren for 2nd place in the championship, but as far as fighting the Red Bulls for race wins, Alonso can only hope for the better.
“You know I like playing with numbers,” he told Ferrari's official website, when asked to evaluate his chances in the 2011 F1 season. “As I travelled backwards and forwards between home, Maranello and Turkey, I made a comparison between my first four races of last year and those of this year in the corresponding grands prix.”
“What came out of this little game was that compared to 2010 I'm eight points short (49 versus 41) but in the same four races, this year I've brought home 13 more points compared to last year (41 versus 28).”
“It's true that my current gap to the top of the drivers' championship is much greater (52 points) compared to what I had after Shanghai 2010 (11 points) but I well recall that after Silverstone we were 47 points away and we only had eight races left.”
“Today we still have 15 grands prix to come,” he continued his mathematics lesson. “This shows that you can look at the same thing in two different, even completely opposite ways. What matters are results and we've started to make the podium: we must do that regularly and if so I'm convinced that we will again be able to fight for the title.”
Ferrari showed pace not only in the race, but also in qualifying, where Alonso made the second row on the grid for the first time this season. And according to the Spaniard, this is only the first step towards greater things from the Scuderia.
“We have a lot of irons in the fire and we hope that as early as next week in Barcelona we will have new parts that allow us to take an important step forward in qualifying as well,” he added.
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