By role
June 4 2003

Fernando Alonso was quite happy of his effort after the Monaco GP. He fought a hard race to finish 5th and get back on third position in the Drivers Championship. Alonso was able to overtake Jarno Trulli and David Coulthard on the pits and was able to finish 5th on a race that he had started 8th:

“To regain third position on the standings is also quite important, even if at this time of the season means little to be third, fourth or sixth. At the end each driver will be in its place and I guess will go down by the end of the year, but is fun and gives me morale to pass Barrichello on the standings.”

His team was not happy of the performace of the cars this weekend as they have expected a podium for this race. However, Alonso was satisfied with his race:

“The result is not bad if we take under consideration that the car was not adapting well to the track on Thursday, it had some problems, and that on Saturday I lost some track time, I think my qualifying run and the race have been the best of the weekend for me and to grab four points are quite god for our chances to finish high on the standings.”

Alonso had to be aggressive at the start in order to advance through the field:

“I took risks at the start, since we know we have a good launch system and it was one of the few places we had to overtake and at the end it worked perfectly. To finish on the top 5 is a very good result for the team, with a McLaren and a Ferrari behind us.”

Next stop is Canada. What are Alonso’s expectations?

“In Canada I hope to continue scoring points and not like in Austrai that I could not finish and you start to loose points and you loose positions. If we finish races we can get good results.” He added.