19/07/2011
NEWS STORY
There were more than a few raised eyebrows last season when, in the wake of a difficult British Grand Prix in which he and his teammate finished 14th and 15th, Fernando Alonso declared that he would win the championship. At the time the Spaniard was 47 points behind championship leader Lewis Hamilton while his team was third in the Constructors' Championship, trailing McLaren by 113 points. However, just a few months later the Spaniard and his team went to Abu Dhabi as red hot favourites. The rest, as they say, is history.
This year, the Spaniard is 92 points down on the championship leader, while his team has exactly half the points that Red Bull has.
Buoyed by his team's excellent result at Silverstone, team boss Stefano Domenicali refuses to claim that the British Grand Prix marked the beginning of another epic fight back, admitting that that his team has to take each race as it comes.
"We know that Ferrari cannot be happy with winning just one race so far this season," he admits, "but it was important for the morale of everyone in the company to make sure that everyone feels the pleasant atmosphere that comes with being successful.
"I never considered a season without a win," he continues. "Don't forget that in the last eighteen years, Ferrari has always won at least one grand prix per year. Eighteen years is a lot and I don't think that other teams can claim this sort of result.
"For the first three months of the season I would give a negative score to Ferrari for its performance," he admits. "But I would say the last part of the first half of the year was better because, although we only took one win, we were competitive enough to have won more, but for various circumstances. So I would score it slightly higher, maybe a bit more than the average, in the hope that the second half of the season will be higher still.
"We don't have to look at the classification," he continues, referring to the championship, "but instead make sure that our performance is always at the highest standard race by race. We know of course that this is difficult because the competition is extremely strong. Then, we will see later on what will be the outcome of the championship. But at the moment we will just fight race by race."