Alonso says second a perfect result

Alonso had to settle for a distant second position behind Schumacher, who scored his second win in a row and the fourth of the season to close to the gap to the Spaniard.

Ferrari's Schumacher is now 17 points behind Alonso with seven races remaining.

Despite that, Alonso was delighted with the result.

"The car was okay, we put a lot of fuel in the stops to go quite long and at the end of the run the tyres were not in perfect condition after I pushed at the beginning of the stint with a heavy car," said Alonso.

"But it worked nice and we had this few tenths down compared to Michael to win the race, but to be second after a difficult weekend for us is a perfect result."

Alonso was stuck behind Schumacher's teammate Felipe Massa at the start, and for several laps the world champion tried to put the Brazilian under pressure without success.

Alonso finally moved ahead of the Ferrari driver during the second round of pitstops.

"It was close but I was nearly on the grass at one point so I had to back off and after that I tried to overtake him but it is very difficult on this track," he added.

"We waited for the stops, we hoped at that stage of the race to have more consistency on the tyres. We thought we would be ahead of Felipe and everything worked as planned."

Alonso said the Brazilian had not made him lose much time, however.

"Not much, maybe I lost two to five seconds during the first sting. Not enough to win the race and I think it didn't change too much at the end."

Alonso's Renault teammate Giancarlo Fisichella finished down in sixth place.