Fernando Alonso suffered another blow in practice as yet another of his Ferrari engines failed on him.
He has already used two of a maximum eight allocated engines in the first four races of the season, leaving him just six engines to complete the remaining 16 races, including this weekend’s race in China.
If, at the end of the year he has no choice but to use a new engine, outside of his eight, he will incur a grid penalty.
Alonso isn’t worried though, and remains confident Ferrari have the situation under control.
“My worry is zero. With the race engines, with the ones we use for Saturday and Sunday, we are still working as planned and the Friday engines will have to do a few more kilometres from here to the end of the year, but always within the limits we reached during winter testing.
“If we break more engines then we’ll start thinking, but right now there are no worries, and this engine was going to reach its end sooner or later. That’s why we removed it in Bahrain. We knew it was dying.”
Ferrari also looked as though they were testing their F-duct in practice, but Alonso revealed the system wasn’t active.
“The F-system was not active,” he said. “We tested some parts of the engine cover and the rear wing to validate them and to check they worked fine, but the aerodynamicists will now gather data. But the system was not complete.
