Alonso fears Red Bull is out of reach

"Well, regarding what they showed today in the second practice, yes," said Alonso when asked if Red Bull was untouchable.

"They have been very, very quick and it is very difficult for all of us to aim for those times. But we will see sometimes some good Fridays for some people, and then on Saturday they struggle a little bit more.

"So fingers crossed we can find something in our cars to be closer to them, and hopefully then they can hopefully do a mistake somewhere in the set-up or whatever and we can close the gap. In normal conditions we know it is going to be very difficult to beat them this weekend," added the Ferrari driver.

Alonso, whose team has introduced several updates for this weekend's race, admitted it was still hard to judge the performance gains.

"I think it is difficult to evaluate," he said. "This is just a day to check everything is working with the car. At the end I am happy with the evolution, happy with the updates on the car. Tomorrow we will see how the developments work and how close we can be to the Red Bulls."

And the two-time champion revealed Ferrari had altered its approach to Friday's practice in order to have a stronger qualifying.

"We did change some of the approach for the grand prix, we saw in the first races that maybe we didn't maximise the potential of the car in qualifying, so we divided the programme into half of the session doing race simulation and preparing car for the race, and the other half of the session trying to be close to the qualifying performance.

"So overall hopefully we can learn some things and tonight we can prepare the car for the race and qualifying, while at some of the other races maybe we concentrated too much on the race."