Fernando Alonso confident Ferrari can fight for the title

It was work as usual for Fernando Alonso having to drag the car somehow into the top 10 in qualifying today. But Felipe Massa again failed to make it into the top 10 although he was a bit closer on pace to Alonso compared to the first two races.

Even after qualifying a mammoth 1.5 seconds behind pole position man Nico Rosberg, Fernando remained upbeat that Ferrari can find the lacking performance. Correcting some things might result in gaining of significant amount of time.

“This is the first priority. What is not working now, try to make it work and when we are happy with the car we will see what is the gap exactly,” he said. “At the moment it is too big because the car is not working.”

He also said that he expects the usual suspects – McLaren, Red Bull and Mercedes – to fight for the championship come the later part of the season.

“It’s true that at the moment we see some surprises, a very quick Williams in Australia, Sauber is doing a fantastic job in this part of the world championship,” Alonso told reporters after qualifying ninth. But I guess to fight for the world championship only the top teams will be there (in the end) because they have the facilities, they have the budget, the experience of fighting for the championship. So I guess McLaren, Mercedes and hopefully Ferrari will be at the end challenging for the world championship. The other teams, the resources and capacity they have are maybe more limited compared to the top teams.”

Even though he expects Ferrari to compete for the top spots later in the season, he was very realistic regarding the chances with the current F2012. “Obviously we are not stupid, and we know we are quite far behind and we need to work, one second is a lot of gap to recover but the car has some big problems in terms of aerodynamics”.