Fernando Alonso has expressed his delight over qualifying fifth for tomorrow’s Italian Grand Prix despite appearing to berate his team over the radio during the final qualifying session after Ferrari’s tactics failed to pay off.
With Monza being the fastest circuit on the calendar, it can be highly beneficial for drivers to get in a teammate’s slipstream in order to reduce drag and therefore increase their speed. As they have done in the past two years, Ferrari opted to send their drivers out together on track with Felipe Massa leading from Alonso. By sending them around the circuit line astern, Alonso would benefit from Massa’s slipstream and theoretically post a better time.
However, during their final run, Massa appeared to pull away from Alonso, thus ruining the tactic and forcing the Spanish driver to solely rely on his own pace. He spoke over the radio to his team in Italian, but reports in the paddock from Italian journalists suggest that he may have called his team “stupid” for allowing Massa to pull away.
Eventually, Massa outqualified Alonso to line up in fourth with the Spanish driver fifth. Although the result may appear to be far from ideal for Ferrari, Alonso took to Twitter to express his happiness over his qualifying performance:
A good qualy finally after the last saturdays so so… Tomorrow we must try to be close to redbull in first part of the race! #forzaferrari
— Fernando Alonso (@alo_oficial) September 7, 2013
In the press session after the race, Alonso insisted that he had thanked his team after qualifying, with this result being a marked improvement from ninth in Belgium last time out.
Alonso had spoken out on Thursday to dismiss any rumors suggesting that he may be unhappy at the team, but this latest incident will only fuel the fire of conspiracy theorists in the paddock.
