With his 44th birthday just a month away Fernando Alonso continues give his all with the difficult Aston Martin AMR25.
The Spaniard struggled all weekend in Austria with a car has that had balance issues and didn’t respond to changes – a characteristic it has demonstrated all season – and yet he managed to get to 11th on the grid.
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When I asked if that outcome represented damage limitation given the issues he’d had in practice he agreed it was.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I think the whole weekend has been so-so for me, I was not happy with the car.
“We had a very unbalanced car since FP1, very understeering at high-speed, very oversteering in the slow-speed. So it’s difficult when you deal with two problems that separated and that big in different parts of the circuit.
“So we tried multiple setups between the two cars, just to try to help each other and try to get to a conclusion faster.
“And we could not move the character of the car from that, and we still ended up in qualifying with exactly the same balance problem that we had in FP1.
“So that was the frustrating thing throughout the weekend. But on the other side, as you said, position-wise it’s not too bad, P11, only one place away from the points. So let’s take the good part of the qualifying, and hopefully be a little bit stronger tomorrow.”
With the cars diverging Lance Stroll was as high as P4 on Friday, and Alonso took note.
“Yesterday in FP2 he was a little bit different in setup,” he said. “And I tried it this morning, it was a little bit better, but still, this morning, I was not in a happy place with the car.
“And just now in qualifying, I put a good lap in Q1 at the end, and a good lap now in Q2, and thanks to that, I’m P11, but I’m aware that tomorrow is going to be a tricky race. It been a challenging weekend, so I don’t expect tomorrow by luck I will become fast…”
He added: “I was struggling. I was changing the car upside down with setup, and the car felt the same going into qualifying, the car felt the same, and I thought it was a difficult afternoon.
“So we managed to be P11, which is a good result, but I’m concerned for tomorrow, no doubt.”
Alonso has scored points in the last two races, and with a Sauber and an Alpine ahead of him on the grid he does at least have a chance to fight for the top 10.
“Yeah, absolutely,” he said. “Let’s see. Especially the Alpine, they’ve been up and down, sometimes they are fast, sometimes not. I think in FP2 long run, I was behind Gasly and I was a little bit faster. So maybe our race pace is a little bit better than Alpine.
“But you never know. I think the moment we need to be clever on the strategy. Tomorrow is going to be very tight.
“A lot of DRS trains in the race, and you need to choose if you want to be in that DRS train and kill the tyres a little, but keep the pace, or you want to separate a little bit and breathe some clean air. So that will be the decision we need to make tomorrow.”
Adam Cooper F1 