Planet-F1

Alonso: This is completely amazing

Sunday 12th October 2008

An ecstatic Fernando Alonso admits it is "difficult to believe" that he won back-to-back races.

Alonso followed up his Singapore Grand Prix win with another masterful display in Japan. The Spaniard started the race on the second row of the grid, but he quickly got a sniff of victory when Lewis Hamilton, Kimi Raikkonen and Heikki Kovalainen all fell back following a first-corner incident.

He then easily saw off the challenge of BMW's Robert Kubica to claim victory at Fuji Speedway.

Alonso was obviously over the moon and was quick to pay tribute to his Renault mechanics.

"It's difficult to believe," the 27-year-old said after his latest victory.

"Obviously the Singapore win was completely unexpected after a very sad Saturday coming from retirement in qualifying.

"Okay I won with special conditions with the Safety Car, but today we had nothing and we won again and at a circuit that is not particularly good for our characteristics. I cannot believe it right now, back-to-back wins.

"The team did a great job to improve the car and we are right now behind Ferrari and McLaren and this is something is completely amazing."

The Spaniard says he is getting that "vibe" from 2006 when he won the World Championship with the French squad.

"[The attitude in the team feels] more or less similar to 2006, but then we had the Championship battle so everyone was more concentrated on getting points than going to the limits," he said.

"We keep learning about the new regulations, the new electronics. We have improved quite a lot the management of the tyres in the race pace and long runs so we understood the problems at the beginning of the season.

"We concentrate to work on those areas and now the results are coming with improvements in the season.

"I am very happy and very proud of my team to have the key to improve all the problems we had. It is a great job from everybody in the factory."