• Ferrari news

Alonso quietly confident about F10 upgrades

Fernando Alonso said his first impressions of the upgraded Ferrari F10 were "very good", after putting some mileage on the chassis during a filming day at the team's Fiorano test track.

Although in-season track testing is banned, the teams are allowed to complete a limited amount of running to gather promotional video footage for their sponsors. To comply with the regulations, Alonso was using super-hard promotional tyres for the run but still said the car, with Red Bull-style exhausts, lived up to expectations.

"The feeling was very good," he said in Valencia. "I was running behind a car with cameras, at 60KPH so it was very stable. We did some laps also with no car in front, and ten cameras on the car and on the helmet, so it was not very comfortable to drive, and it was also the first time driving a Ferrari F1 car at Fiorano.

"We are happy with the job done, we arrive here in Valencia with a good package in our car but we remain very calm about our expectations. We know the other teams were not watching TV in the last few weeks, everyone will bring updates here and hopefully ours is a little bit better than the others."

"Tomorrow [Friday] we'll have a better answer, we expect to have some steps in the car top make it a little bit quicker, but as I said before, all the other teams will also bring some new parts here. The most important thing is to confirm that we are as competitive here as we were in Canada. We need to keep improving the car; this is a job we need to keep doing until Abu Dhabi. There is a long way to go."

But Alonso was wary about making any firm predictions, after an unexpected dip in form at the Turkish Grand Prix last month.

"I think it will be interesting to see this race how it goes," he said. "We've been better at some circuits and had more problems at others - it's been a bit up and down in the last couple of races. Hopefully we can continue the performance we saw in Montreal - the kind that put us on a competitive level, fighting with McLarens and Red Bulls. In Turkey we were not quick enough so we try to confirm the feeling of Canada, being competitive again and hopefully finish on the podium again."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.