By Pablo Elizalde Sunday, April 8th 2007, 09:09 GMT
Fernando Alonso admitted he was surprised to score his first victory with McLaren so early after dominating the Malaysian Grand Prix.
The Spanish driver took the lead of the race at the first corner, beating pole-setter Felipe Massa, and never looked back, finishing over 17 seconds ahead of teammate Lewis Hamilton.
The victory was Alonso's first with McLaren after only two races, and also the first for the team since the 2005 Brazilian Grand Prix.
"It is absolutely fantastic and a wonderful surprise what they achieved in such a short time," said Alonso, who left the Renault team at the end of last season.
"I remember a short test in December only one day, the new car in January... a lot of work has been done, a lot of effort has been done to be ready for the first race but we never expected to be that competitive.
"It is difficult to believe but we have to give a big thanks to everybody."
Alonso, who thanks to his win has taken the championship lead from Kimi Raikkonen, admitted that moving into the lead at the start was crucial to winning in Sepang.
"One of our chances to win the race was to be first after the first corner and thanks to a very good start, thanks to the car, I was able to arrive side by side with Felipe," he added.
"I was inside, so I managed to be first and for sure to have my teammate made things easier to open a gap."
Despite his dominant victory, the 16th of his career, Alonso believes McLaren have still work to do to match Ferrari's race pace.
"I think to be honest we need to work a little bit, especially on race pace. With Felipe having a good start and keeping first position it would have been difficult to follow their pace, so we have to not confuse ourselves on that.
"But we are much much closer than in Australia, we have improvements coming shortly so we should be alright in the end, and I think it will be a very close fight but I think our team has the potential to do it."
The McLaren driver had a scare early on in the race when his radio stopped working, a similar problem to the one suffered by Raikkonen in Australia.
"From lap 10 to the first stop I had no radio, the same as Kimi in Australia, it seems a lucky thing to have in the race. In the first stop I was lucky I saw the arrows, so I came to the pit with a little bit of doubt if the guys were there or not and Ron was telling me the radio was off.
"I knew already, but I think they adjusted something in the pitstop and it worked ok the rest of the race."
