Alonso says Malaysian race hardest of his career

Sepang: Fernando Alonso described Sunday`s Malaysian Grand Prix as the hardest race of his life after retiring on the penultimate lap and losing the championship lead to Ferrari team mate Felipe Massa.

Massa finished seventh to leapfrog Alonso in the standings after the Spaniard suffered an engine failure while battling McLaren`s world champion Jenson Button for eighth place. While Sebastian Vettel led a Red Bull one-two with Mark Webber, Ferrari were left to scrap with McLaren for the minor places after both teams botched their chances of victory with tactical errors in qualifying. "On the formation lap, my gearbox broke and I had no clutch during the race, so I had to brake in a weird way," a rueful Alonso told reporters after starting the race in 19th place on the grid."So it was probably the hardest race of my whole life in terms of driving, because I had to improvise for every corner. But even so we were going to get a few points, which in the end was not possible because of the engine." The twice world champion started the season with a victory in Bahrain and a fourth in Melbourne a week ago but despite his flop in Malaysia, Alonso tried to look on the bright side of his misfortune. IMPROVEMENT NEEDED "If the gearbox and then the engine are going to break, it`s better that in happens when you are ninth than when you are leading and you lose 25 points," he said. Massa battled bravely to secure six points after starting 21st on the grid but admitted that the car needed to improve if Ferrari wanted to stay ahead of their title rivals. "We scored some points, which is always important, and it was a race in which you could easily not have scored any," the Brazilian said. "We need to work not to repeat what we did yesterday in qualifying and we need to improve the car race by race, because Red Bull is very strong and McLaren is strong as well. "It`s always very nice to lead the championship, but we still have 16 races to go and we need to improve because there are many drivers up there and many things can change.” "So we need to keep our feet on the ground." Team principal Stefano Domenicali was far from happy with his team`s performance over the three days in Malaysia. "There`s no way we can be happy with the outcome of this third weekend of the season," he fumed. "Today`s result is down to yesterday`s qualifying and when you start that far back on the grid, it`s difficult to do better.” "On top of that we had a reliability issue. If we want to win the title, we absolutely have to sort these problems out." PTI