Interview With Fernando Alonso
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Oct 17, 2008
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Question: You come off a roll of two wins. What are your feelings about this race?
Fernando Alonso: Hopefully we can do well here. Obviously the victory I am still thinking is very far and we are not as quick as maybe the contenders for the win here but we can do a good job again and take hopefully many points for the team. I think the car is really nice to drive now in the last month and a half, so I don’t see any reason that here we will not have a competitive car. But as I said maybe not for the win but hopefully the podium will be our target.
Question: Tell us about the continuing development of the car that has helped to make it a winner?
Fernando Alonso: We have been introducing new parts at every race but some of them were a little bit better from a performance point of view but some of them were not so good, so you know I think we are still not completely sure how the car changed dramatically in the last couple of weeks. We introduced a new front wing but I think it is something more than that. You know, little things in the set-up as well, I think, helped us a lot. We found some new way to set up the car in the last couple of races and it seems to work fine, especially in the long run pace in the race, so we will keep this set-up for sure for this race.
Question: What about the challenges of this circuit?
Fernando Alonso: I think turn one is our main challenge from a driver’s point of view because it is a very long corner that you need to guess more or less to turn in and you need to continually downshift all the way through turn one and you can make good time there. Also there is the very long straight at the back. You need to have a good exit from the corner before but I think it is very similar for everybody and the set-up of the car can also be crucial here as it is a very, very long straight and you need to take some downforce off but you need the downforce in the corners, so you need to find the compromise.
Question: You said earlier this week you would do your best to help Felipe win the world championship. Could I ask in which aspects in detail, what you will do? By the way, my home city is the sister city of Oviedo.
Fernando Alonso: When I said this in Fuji what I meant is that now we have a competitive car it seems that we are able to fight sometimes with Ferrari and McLaren and first of all we need to have a competitive, hard car here in Shanghai and Brazil to be fighting with Ferrari and McLaren. If we do that and Felipe wins the race and I can be second or third I will be happy to help Felipe to take as many points as possible and this is the only approach.
Question: Would you like to see Lewis win as much as the other two drivers?
Fernando Alonso: We can be here forever and you cannot misunderstand what I say, you know. When we say all these things, my best relationship for example is with Robert. I would like to see him winning the championship but I know this is quite difficult because I think the performance of his car etc it will be difficult to recover 12 points. I will do my own race but after all, when you finish the race and see the results, you prefer some drivers to win or some teams to win compared to others but I don’t think that I will be a key part of the championship. Whatever driver wins will win because he won the last two races or did a better job than the other one, so that’s all. You can take whatever you can from my comment but it is very simple.
