Alonso says hopes remain high

The Renault driver finished at 19th quickest in the afternoon session, but the Spaniard was not worried about his position in the timesheets, as he was focusing on race preparation.

"Although we are at the bottom of the timesheets, I don't think we should be too worried as we concentrated more on race configuration today," said Alonso.

"Tomorrow morning in the third free practice session we will be preparing for qualifying and so I think we can remain optimistic for the rest of the weekend.

"We need to try to reach Q3, as we did in Malaysia, and aim to score as many points as possible. I think overall today we struggled to find the right set-up, but even looking at the times, we still have high hopes for this weekend."

Team-mate Nelson Piquet was 16th fastest, the Brazilian admitting there was still work to do before he is comfortable with the car.

"The track conditions were quite poor early on but later in the day things were a bit better," he said. "We improved the car between the two sessions, but we still need to find more performance and I'm still not totally happy with the set-up.

"So we still have a lot of work to do tomorrow morning to make sure we get the most from qualifying."