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Formula One
F1: Alonso Upbeat Despite Engine Failure
Fernando Alonso says his team was expecting the engine to break...
SPEED Staff / GMM  |  Posted April 16, 2010   Shanghai (CHN)
The Ferrari team works to recover the car of Fernando Alonso at the Shanghai International Circuit, Shanghai, China. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Fernando Alonso says he’s not concerned about suffering his second engine failure of the year in practice in China on Friday.

The engine that broke had indicated trouble in Bahrain, and was replaced for the race. The team had kept it for Friday practice use and had a fair idea that it would eventually break.

However the blow-up comes shortly after a failure of a newer engine in the Malaysian race, which leaves Alonso with six engines for the 16 race weekends, including the rest of the China event.

“To be honest I’m not worried,” said Alonso. “Unfortunately we lost an engine today, that is never a good thing. We would like to have both engines perfectly OK. We knew this engine was a little bit damaged after Bahrain, it’s the one we replaced in Bahrain before the race. So we are not too worried at the moment.

“On Fridays from now on we will use very old engines, and that is the only risk. The race engines or the qualy engines they will be as the original plan we put on January, very fresh engines and very OK. So not a problem.

“And about the failure itself, it’s something we were expecting. Maybe not here, but here or Barcelona. Unfortunately we knew that this engine was degrading a bit every Friday.”

Despite losing track time Alonso says he’s optimistic about the team’s form for the rest of the weekend.

“I think it will be fine. I don’t see any reason to not be optimistic for tomorrow. We lack some overall grip today, the track conditions were a little bit slippery, and we saw also on the TV all the cars sliding and having some problems.

“So it was I think just the characteristics of today. We did our program with quite a good amount of fuel, preparing for the race, and the first analysis we did after finishing the session seems positive, and no real big changes compared to the last Grand Prix for example.”

Meanwhile the Spaniard ran with some elements of Ferrari’s new ‘F-Duct’ system, although it wasn’t fully operational.

“It was not activated, it was just some new parts for the system, just to validate the parts and do some mileage, and to do some comparing in the aero numbers compared to the standard ones. The full system is not in the car, so it was just the engine cover.”

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