• Spanish Grand Prix - Qualifying

We wanted more - Alonso

Fernando Alonso: "On the longer runs Ferrari is as quick as the others or maybe even better" © Sutton Images

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• Race:
• Spanish Grand Prix

• Drivers:
• Fernando Alonso

• Teams:
• Ferrari

Fernando Alonso is confident his Ferrari will be "as strong or stronger" than the cars ahead of him on the grid for Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix.

Alonso will start from fifth on the grid after Mercedes locked out the front row ahead of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen. Alonso said Ferrari had hoped to be higher up the grid than fifth, but thinks he stands a good chance of moving forwards in the race.

"For sure we wanted to be higher than P5," he said. "Hopefully tomorrow we can fight for the win starting from fifth. At the end of the day we had the maximum; we had two sets of tyres in Q3 and we repeated the same time both times. It's not that the lap had any mistakes it's just that we found the limit today.

"The car maybe is not as quick as the others on one-lap pace but on the longer runs it is as quick as the others or maybe even better. That is our strong point and we need to take every opportunity to make that count tomorrow. For tomorrow we need to be optimistic, try to be on the podium and hopefully something more. I think the opportunities will come with a good race."

He said Ferrari needed to find improvements in order to challenge for pole position at future races.

"On Saturday we are still missing a couple of tenths, but I think today was not a big surprise for anyone in the team. We were more or less three or four tenths off pole position in the last two or three grands prix and here some people brought new parts so we are half a second. We need to recover this half a second over the next few races."

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