“It [my Ferrari] felt slow for all the race, to be honest,” Alonso told reporters in Sepang, including Crash.net. “I felt not competitive enough and I was not fast enough in the first stint to compete with the guys in front. Then when we did the first stint and we switched for another set of medium tyres. I was not really comfortable then either – not comfortable with the balance and not comfortable with the brakes. It was a little bit of a nightmare out there. We understand that Hulkenberg was on a different strategy and from that point we needed to push and try and get him. It was not possible to challenge the Red Bull. But we knew Hulkenberg would be in front in the last stint and so we will need to overtake him. There was no time to lose in the pit stop or with the people we were lapping, any small time lost, would be a penalty later on. We tried to concentrate on that” he declared.

“About the performance, I don’t think there was much difference in stints one, two, three or four. It was just a little bit less fuel every stint and we were a little bit more comfortable with the car [as a result]. But all the rest through, we were not happy.”

“Traction was not good. Out of the corners we were losing ground. But obviously we are comparing our car with the best traction car out there, which is the Red Bull. Maybe it was more or less expected this deficit. Also with the top-speed it is no secret we are not comparable to Mercedes. They were fastest in Australia, fastest in the pre-season tests and fastest here and to pass Hulkenberg we had to do it in the second corner. That is not a normal position to overtake. But with the tyre advantage that I had in the last stint, that was the easiest place for me to do it.”

“We have some work to do. Obviously for Bahrain there is not much we can do because in five days we are in the car again. There won’t be any magical change on the cars. It will be more or less similar there. The track characteristics are a little bit different so, with more long straights, probably we will see Williams, for example, has a very good top speed and will be competitive in Bahrain. We saw that also in the test with [Felipe] Massa and [Valtteri] Bottas. It is going to be tough again. But somehow we manage to always be in the top-five. At the moment with the performance we have, it is giving us some good points. We must finish the race in Bahrain. But for China and Spain it is very clear what we need to bring to the car and we will. We need to do better. No one in the team is giving up. We have the potential and we have talented people and the resources. Let’s work on it.”