Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa head to Australia wanting nothing short of a race victory to start their title challenges...
Fernando Alonso: "It is always a challenge when you have regulation changes. You have many new things to test and learn about and me and Felipe did enough mileage to understand everything we needed to. So now it's great to finally be racing, especially as we had to wait these extra fifteen days because the Bahrain event was cancelled, but anyway, I am very happy to be here."
"If you race for Ferrari, you always have the goal of fighting for the World Championship, because that is the history of Ferrari: this team is all about passion, motor racing and winning again is our goal for the 2011 campaign. Whether we win or lose will depend on so many factors.
"I love Melbourne and everything that goes on, as there are so many attractions around the Grand Prix so that the people get to enjoy the whole weekend from Friday onwards. As the first race of the season, I can expect it to be very exciting, as we have seen strange races here in the past, many involving the Safety Car. Honestly, sometimes it can be a race just to survive. We will try our best and hope to score some points to start the season in a very good way and in a good atmosphere."
Felipe Massa: "Over the winter, the challenge has been to learn everything based on all the changes to the rules and to put everything together in such a way that we can start our season moving in the right direction. That's really what the winter was all about. I think we did a good job with a lot of mileage in the car which was very important to have a clear picture of our package going into the season. It was good that we did the most laps of any team, usually at least one hundred a day. Now, the difference is that this weekend we will also get a clear picture of where we are compared to the other teams, because in testing there were too many variables to make a comparison, even if clearly we were not slow. At least we will really understand how good is our car and how good are the other teams.
"I am more comfortable in getting the car to work properly, especially in qualifying trim which is where I had difficulties last year. This has made me feel more confident. On the other hand, the races will be very different to what we were used to: higher tyre degradation will mean more pit stops and so the way you approach the race and how you plan the strategy will be a change. Last year, we could do a race with just one stop for tyres and remember that sometimes, we only made that one pit stop because it was in the rules that you had to change tyres. This year, it will be very unlikely to happen that we only stop once and it is more likely we have races with three or even four tyre changes. Getting to understand this aspect will be the key to having a good race.
"The goal is to have a completely different championship to my 2010, in every way, so that I return to fighting for the top places in every qualifying session and every race. I am really confident we can do that."
