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At the conclusion of the Italian Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso recorded a second consecutive fourth-place finish after gambling on his tyre choice, bringing home good points for Renault. The result also allowed a fourth-place tie to occur in the constructors' championship between Renault and Toyota.

Pat Symonds, Renault's Executive Director of engineering, looks back at the unexpected Monza score, comments on the battle with Toyota, and speaks of the inaugural Singaporean race coming up this week-end.

Pat, another fourth place for the team in Monza. You must be happy with this result after such an unpredictable weekend...

"We hadn't had a great test at Monza so we didn't think it was going to be a great circuit for us and we arrived there knowing that we still had a lot of set-up work to do. Therefore, the poor weather was a mixed blessing because although we couldn't continue exploring alternative set-up options, it probably equalised things a little bit and allowed us to punch above our weight. Overall, I was extremely happy with the result and having halved the gap to Toyota in Spa, we are now on equal terms, which is our main objective at the moment."

The team played the strategy perfectly with Fernando. Was it a gamble to switch to wets so early?

"I've said before, particularly after Nelson (Piquet)'s result at Hockenheim, that sometimes you make your own luck, and I think Monza was a case in point. Having made it through to Q3 with Fernando, we didn't raise our expectations too much because we could see that we were very likely to be dealing with changeable weather conditions on Sunday. That meant we needed to keep an open strategy with a very wide pit-stop window and so we fuelled both drivers pretty heavily."

"Even so, it was still an incredibly difficult call when Fernando made his stop and we had to decide which tyres to go with because although the track was drying, the radar was showing more rain on the way. Fitting the standard wet was therefore a gamble, but with both Toyotas in front of us on extreme wet tyres, we knew that fitting wets was the only decision that might allow us to beat them and get a result."

Ten points in two races and you've closed Toyota's lead. Fourth place has never been closer...

"You can't get any closer than equality! Obviously, as the number of races decreases, even a constant gap becomes more difficult to deal with and so it's nice to have made up the ground we needed to so quickly. I do believe that on balance our car is better than the Toyota; it's very close and there are certainly days when they might be stronger than us and days when we are stronger than them. We beat them in Monza by outracing them as a team, but it's far from over and we know we are going to have a tough fight on our hands through to the end of the season."