Fernando Alonso believes Renault is in the group of teams behind pre-race favourite Red Bull heading into Saturday’s qualifying session for the Belgium Grand Prix.
Although the Spaniard finished down in 13th position in the one fully dry practice session at Spa on Friday, he says the team opted not to complete a final new-tyre run with his car in the closing stages and instead focused on further set-up work.
Renault’s rookie driver Romain Grosjean’s afternoon time is therefore more reflective of Renault’s potential aound the high-speed circuit, the Frenchman ending the day with the fifth-best time which was just over 0.1s off the pace.
Having been pleased with the handling of his own R29 throughout the day, Alonso believes Renault can be competitive with all the teams except from perhaps RBR.
“I think we are strong,” he told reporters.
“We are not to be too worried about anyone at the moment, only maybe the Red Bulls are on top of everybody.
“Apart from the Red Bulls, Ferrari are strong, McLaren are strong and Williams we know in the last couple of races are strong.
“Toyota seems to be quick in this circuit as well – but we are there as well. We are in that group.
“I am confident and I’m quite happy with the car today, so tomorrow we just have to maximise the potential in the car with some more set-up changes that we have to do tomorrow morning.”
After completing just 13 laps in the rain-affected morning session, Alonso says the team then had to cram the remainder of its Friday set-up programme into the second 90-minute session.
He says it therefore decided to ensure it completed this work in the closing minutes of the session rather than test the ultimate speed of the car with a low-fuel run, explaining his finishing position outside of the top 10.
“Because we missed the missed session because of rain, in the second session we had a lot of things to do that we carried over from the first session [as] we missed the opportunity to do some changes,” he said.
“All the P2 session we just concentrated on getting the programme done and recover some time, so in the end it was better to miss the last new tyre run with less fuel and keep concentrated on the changes.
“We felt it was more important to do the last set-up change just to confirm some ideas we had and the times we know today are not very important.”
He stressed that with an encouraging Friday now out of the way, Renault needed to put together an error-free qualifying session to get as high up the grid as possible.
“In quali we need to do a perfect lap,” he
“It happened to us sometimes this year, we don’t do a perfect qualifying and then in the race we are always behind someone.
“So it is important for the grid positions on Sunday to try and be in the first positions.
Grosjean, meanwhile, feels he is well prepared for his first F1 weekend at Spa having got to grips with the demanding 4.3-mile circuit in both wet and dry conditions.
“Today was very interesting as we had wet and dry conditions as is quite normal for Spa,” he said.
“Once again Fernando has been very helpful and comparing my data with his data really helped me today as I could see where I needed to improve.
“In the afternoon session we concentrated on testing the two types of tyre and I managed to do over 30 laps so I think we are quite well prepared for tomorrow."