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Ferrari upgrades not a 'last ditch effort' - Alonso

Fernando Alonso is keeping faith in Ferrari to hit top gear in the second half of the season © Getty Images

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Fernando Alonso insists the upgrade to his Ferrari in Valencia will not be a "last ditch" effort to improve it, and that there are already further improvements in the pipeline.

After Ferrari's disappointing result at the Turkish Grand Prix it came under fire from some section of the media, amid suggestions that it should shift focus to its 2011 car. However, with Alonso just 15 points adrift of championship leader Lewis Hamilton, he has confirmed that Ferrari are still attacking aggressively.

"We will have major updates on the F10 which I hope will allow us to up our performance level," he said in his blog on the Ferrari website. "Following on from that, we have further developments in the pipeline which should arrive for England and Germany: which is to say that the European Grand Prix is simply the ninth round of the championship, not a last ditch effort for Ferrari, which I heard some people saying."

"I don't see how they can say that given that we have not even reached the halfway point of the season and that after Valencia there will still be ten grands prix to go. I've said it before and I'll say it again now, this is a stage event and the final one of those stages will not come until November in Abu Dhabi. There is still a long way to go and things can change very quickly, going either one way or the other. People seem to have forgotten that last year, in the middle part of the season and in a car that was getting ever less competitive, Kimi [Raikkonen a Ferrari driver] was the driver who had scored the most points."

He added that his initial disappointment at missing out on a win at the Canadian Grand Prix has now been replaced by a sense of relief that Turkey was a one off.

"A couple of days on from the race, the sense of disappointment that we missed out on a win that was within our grasp has been replaced with the awareness that we did actually get a great result. We have to look at it as a glass half full because, on the Thursday we would have been satisfied with the thought of a podium finish. We were competitive throughout the whole weekend, both in qualifying and the race, which is very positive. We were back to where we have been in practically all the other races, the one exception being Turkey, where for various reasons, everything about the Grand Prix went wrong, from every point of view. The normal situation is the one we have seen in Montreal, Monaco, Melbourne and Sakhir and all the other tracks where we fought for a podium finish.

"Maybe the results did not always match our potential, but I think the same can be said for all the top teams. In these first eight races of the season, all sorts of things happened - mistakes, reliability problems, bad luck - but we are still in the thick of the fight for both championships. The same can be said of McLaren and Red Bull, who have also missed out on points along the way."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.