F1 News
Date: 1/November/2012
F1 title contender Fernando Alonso has laughed off suggestions he fell out with Ferrari Technical Director Pat Fry during last weekend’s Indian Grand Prix.
Alonso limited the Championship challenge by charging from fifth to second, behind Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel, in the Indian race.
But Italian media have claimed that Alonso was furious at comments from Fry after qualifying on Saturday, which suggested better grid places were possible if they had been “perfect”.
“An argument with Pat Fry after the race in India? A nice invention from someone in the Italian media,” responded Alonso at Abu Dhabi on Thursday. “It was quite creative to be honest!
“Now or later, I will speak to [the reporter] to see how he invented this. We know and it’s a fact that we are slower than Red Bull: we all agree, me the team, our fans, everyone knows. We are very united in our efforts to fix this situation.”
13 points separate Vettel and Alonso heading into the final three events.
Alonso has long pushed for more developments to help match the pace of the Red Bull, with which Vettel has won the last four races in a row.
“We have some updates here and there will be some more in the USA,” revealed Alonso. “The season has had its ups and downs and we have seen four consecutive “ups” for Red Bull, so we think it has to go down sooner or later!”
Expanding on that point, Alonso made clear that he and Ferrari need to be in a position to punish any problem for Vettel.
“We want to be close enough to them to capitalise on anything they do not do perfectly, while we need to be perfect for these next three race weekends,” he explained.
“We know that Red Bull can be a bit more fragile, like Webber’s KERS failure in India, so we need to push them and be on the limit, because if it had been Vettel who had the problem, no one would have noticed because he was [already] ten seconds in front.”
Abu Dhabi was the scene of Vettel’s shock 2010 title victory, when he overhauled both Webber and Alonso at the final race of the year - Alonso’s Ferrari title dream falling apart when he became stuck behind a slower car.
“We are not thinking about the race here in 2010 when we lost the championship: we want to win the Championship at the last race this year in Brazil,” commented Alonso.
“Thanks to KERS and DRS we should not have a repeat of the situation in 2010 that lost me the title when I was stuck for too long behind another car. In the last two years we have seen that these elements have produced exciting racing with plenty of overtaking.”
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