Fernando Alonso had a very encouraging and incredibly frustrating weekend. Victim of a mechanical failure that ruined his qualifying yesterday, he lost the advantage of his position on the track due to a safety car.
He then had to stop during a virtual safety car, caused by the abandonment of Max Verstappen. Unfortunately, his medium tires didn’t last until the finish and he had to return to the pits at the end of the race for a second tire change.
“I’m speechless, to be honest. We’ve had some great weekends in Saudi Arabia and especially here, and we come away with zero points. It’s a little hard to explain.” said Alonso.
“It’s hard to accept that everything is going in the wrong direction at the moment. But there have only been three races in the championship where we have been unlucky. But there are still 20 to go and I hope we will be very lucky!”
Two nice lost chances
Meanwhile, Alpine F1 lost two good points opportunities in Jeddah and Melbourne, and Alonso is concerned he won’t always reach such a competitive level, especially when reliability and race conditions play in his favour.
“That’s the problem, it’s never guaranteed that we’ll be fast on a weekend. And if we’re fast, everything happens on our car or on our side, so it’s madness.”
“But at the moment we have lost sixth place in Saudi Arabia. Here I think we can be sixth or seventh for the safety car. And if we take into account yesterday, the podium was of course playable today without Max.”
“We could have beaten George” [Russell] to get to the podium I think we were quite fast, much faster than the Mercedes on this track. So we missed an opportunity.”
The level of the Alpine A522 is promising
The encouraging aspect of this start to the season is the very good level that Alpine F1 is showing in terms of pure performance. The A522 is sometimes – both in qualifying and in the race – the third force on the grid, which holds great promise for the rest of the season.
“We were extremely unlucky with the safety car. He came on track and everyone regrouped. During the virtual safety car we stopped to change tires but it was too early to finish in mediums.”
“We bet on that, but the safety car had killed our race. It was difficult. After the stop there were four cars in front of us with a DRS train. You can pass cars one by one, but if there are four of them and they all open the DRS, it’s impossible.”
“In the end we killed the tires. Like I said, it’s hard, but that’s the way it is. We can’t look back, only look forward, and Imola will be another chance.”
