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Fernando Alonso in 3rd and Felipe Massa in 17th – this has resulted in Ferrari having mixed feelings after the qualifying session for the Spanish Grand Prix.
The P3 for Fernando shows that Ferrari have definitely made some progress with the F2012. One can say that two fast cars in the form of Vettel’s Red Bull and Schumacher’s Mercedes didn’t set times to play down Ferrari’s performance but one must also see that Fernando beat the two Lotuses, against whom the F2012 barely came close during the first four races on the basis of pace.
Both Ferrari and Fernando have said that the majority of the updates are working and there is good correlation between data on the track and data on the computers back at the factory – one of the major problems Ferrari had in early 2011.
Many things have been said regarding Ferrari failing to make the top 10 in FP2 after Fernando was fastest in FP1 – the true order has been revealed, Ferrari’s struggle continues – but one should not neglect the long run pace of the car which doesn’t look that bad as it did during the first four races. The Ferrari has been quick on the primes all weekend and that claim was reinforced when Fernando said yesterday that the balance was much better on the primes as compared to the options. Other teams gained 1-1.5 seconds on the options but the Ferraris gained less than 5 tenths – so this is more down to changing the setup of the car than the lack of performance as many suggested. When the engineers got the balance right, Fernando was up there among the front runners.
Although Fernando said after qualifying that P3 (P2 after Lewis’ penalty) was over-performing for him, without a step-up in performance the older car would have given him a place at most on the fourth row.
Regarding Felipe’s lowest grid position since the start of the year, it has to be said that the mystery continues. A 0.5s gap between the two drivers is very big and the grid being so close this year even a thousandth of a second matters a lot. So, for Felipe things are looking worse as days go by and it will take something Herculean from the Brazilian to save his seat come the end of the year.
