Alonso sure Renault will fight for wins

Fernando Alonso is adamant his Renault team will be in a position to fight for victories late in the season, despite a slow start to the campaign

The French squad has been unable to fight near the top of the field, with Alonso having two fifth places as his best results after six races.

Team-mate Nelson Piquet is yet to score a point.

Alonso admitted Renault needs a significant improvement to be able to fight at the top, but the two-time champion is convinced his team will be able to achieve that later in the season.

"It's clear that we need to take another step forward," said Alonso. "We will have new developments for the car over the next few weeks and that should help, but I'm not expecting to jump to the front of the grid in Turkey.

"However, I still believe that later in the year we can be back fighting for podiums and winning races, just as we did last year.

"We know it won't be easy, but the whole team is extremely motivated and determined to get back to the front."

Renault's chief of engineering Pat Symonds insisted the team is fully motivated to keep on pushing to get better results.

"We're a team that has always had and continues to have strong morale," he said. "We're all very impressed with the work being done back at base to improve the car by the research and design teams and seeing how quickly we can introduce new parts, such as our new diffuser, does a lot for the morale of everybody in the team.

"We're fighting hard; we're very ambitious and we know where we want to be and we're working hard to get there."