Alonso signs at Ferrari until 2016

Ferrari and its star driver Fernando Alonso announced on Thursday that they had reached an agreement to extend the Spaniard's contract with the Italian team until at least 2016. The double world champion, who has been with Ferrari since 2010, has made no secret of the fact that he would like to end his Formula 1 career at Ferrari.

"I am very happy to have reached this agreement," Alonso said in a statement. "I immediately felt comfortable within Ferrari and now it feels to me like a second family."

"It is a great pleasure to have renewed our agreement with a driver who has always demonstrated a winning mentality even in the most difficult circumstances," added Luca di Montezemolo, the president of Ferrari.

Alonso had initially signed with the team until the end of the 2012 season, but said he felt "happy and privileged" to have extended his contract.

"It was good news for me and my career to extend the contract and get an extension to 2016," Alonso told the press in Barcelona on Thursday, ahead of this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix. "Also, as I said last year the intention is to finish my career with Ferrari. I don't imagine a better place to race for a racing driver. I have been lucky to arrive here last year and I felt at home from day one and I have the possibility to race here until the end of 2016, so it will be seven years in Ferrari."

Despite being tipped for championship glory last year, Alonso failed to take the title at the very last hurdle, getting stuck in traffic at the final Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and losing out to Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel. Alonso's luck does not appear to be improving this year, with Vettel once again at the top of the championship battle, and Alonso struggling back in fifth place. Despite the setbacks, the Spaniard remains confident of his chances for future titles.

"F1 is impossible to predict and it is impossible to predict about wining championships even before you started," he said Thursday. "For sure I am in the best team possible to fight for world championships. Some other teams go up and down, they have good years and bad years. At Ferrari in the worst years you finish second or third in the world championship so this is something Ferrari can offer to a driver."

However, the team may already be thinking about abandoning the title fight for this year and concentrating on 2012, given Ferrari's lukewarm start to the season. From this point onward, the technical departments will split into two, with one group concentrating on the development and evolution of the current car, and the other beginning the first phase of building next year's car.

"That always happens in May, because otherwise it's too late," said Nikolas Tombazis, head of design at Ferrari, and the man in charge of the 2012 car. "We have analyzed the problems we have suffered this year and we will be more aggressive with the next project," the engineer said this week.

Ferrari approached the 2011 season on the defensive, concentrating more on building a robust and reliable car, without any weak points. At the same time, they were banking on the fact that Red Bull, the reigning world champions, would start to slip back in performance terms ? as tends to happen with a team that won the year before. Instead, the Red Bulls have been unstoppable, with Vettel taking 93 of the 100 points up for grabs so far.

The fact that the racing returns to Europe from Saturday means that the teams will be able to introduce updates to their cars at a faster rate than they have been able to do so at the flyaway races. Whether Ferrari decides to pour all of its resources into its 2012 campaign will soon become clear.