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Ferrari will be quicker in Barcelona - Alonso

Fernando Alonso says Ferrari has a 20% understanding of the new car © Press Association

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Fernando Alonso is confident Ferrari will have a much stronger test in Barcelona after it started to get a basic understanding of its new car on the final two days at Jerez.

The new F2012 is a complete departure from last year's F150 Italia and on Thursday technical director Pat Fry admitted he was not happy with its progress in the first three days of running. But on the fourth day Alonso topped the timesheets with a 1:18.877 to allay some fears about the raw performance of the car, even though he only completed 39 laps in total.

However, he said the team was starting to get an understanding of the car and predicted it would have a much more productive test in Barcelona, where he is hoping to unlock more performance by refining the car's setup.

"I think it's very early days at the moment," he said. "There is still a lot of work to do. At the moment we need to keep understanding the car a lot, maybe we understand 20% of what we need and in the next [test] days we will try to get the rest.

"There is still a lot of work to do with the setup, because here we concentrated on the aerodynamics, the constant speed [tests] and some different other reliability tests. But there is a lot more to come also from the setup.

"There are only two more tests unfortunately, because we are one test less than last year, so in Barcelona we need to maximise the time on the track - that is maybe the only negative thing of today. Nine hours available track time and we only did 39 laps, so in Barcelona we need to 100 laps or more because all of that information in those laps will be welcome."

He insisted the Jerez test as a whole had been positive, despite the slightly negative vibe coming from the team earlier in the week.

"There's still a long way to go until Australia in terms of how many days testing we can do," Alonso added. "The progress in these four days has been quite big for us, maybe not in performance or times - I don't know what the times or the track conditions in the first few days compared to now - but definitely all the tests we did and all the understanding of the car has been positive for us and we will arrive in Barcelona much more prepared than how we arrived in Jerez. That is also what Pat tried to say yesterday.

"We arrived at Jerez thinking one idea of the car and maybe it was not exactly like that, but we worked around and we found the performance there and we found the happiness or the level of confidence of driving this car now in day three and day four. Day one in Barcelona will be a much better starting point."

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