Alonso says he can still win race

The Spanish driver was unable to match the pace of the leading trio and had to settle for fourth position behind his championship rivals Felipe Massa, Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Raikkonen.

Alonso, however, is still confident he can fight back and win the race in order to reduce the gap to Hamilton in the standings.

"It is always better to start at the front, in front of everybody if possible, not only my teammate," Alonso told reporters in Turkey.

"It is true that I need to recover seven points and it is not the perfect way to recover the points by starting behind but the points are tomorrow afternoon and hopefully I can finish in front of everybody tomorrow.

"It is not impossible to win the race starting fourth, it all depends about the race pace but nobody knows which one will be the strongest run because yesterday the maximum run was eight or nine laps for everybody so who knows what will happen in a 20 lap run in the race.

"I am really, really confident about the strategy and the long run pace and I will try to recover some pace tomorrow."

Alonso started his final qualifying run with the harder tyre compound, but the Spaniard said he did not lose any performance for it.

"Maybe we lost a little bit of performance in the last attempt of Q3, but I don't think it was coming from the tyre," he said.

"I think the last lap was not 100 percent and I crossed the line very tight to the finish of qualifying and I had a little bit of traffic in front and I didn't get the maximum from the car the last lap. I think the tyres were very, very similar in terms of performance to me.

And the McLaren driver is hoping starting from the dirty side of the track will not affect him too much tomorrow.

"It is always more difficult starting on the wrong side, but hopefully here it will not make too much of a difference. I remember last year or a few years ago Fisichella started second and overtook everybody so it is not that bad to start on that side."