Battling against the clock in a lap that everything indicated would have helped him get involved in the final stretch of the classification, Fernando Alonso ran into Sergio Pérez’s car and worsened his times after a good first sector.
Except in the great prizes of Miami, Spain and Austria, Fernando Alonso has always started top ten on race Sunday, a fact that attests to the consistency maintained by the two-time Spanish champion in Formula 1 at 41 years old.
After the Asturian’s start to the season was ruined by constant failures in your power unitwith the unheard-of option of a front or second row in Australia vanishing due to a mechanical issue on his A522 in Q3 in Melbourne, the #14 fell behind in the table but is already just 13 points behind his team-mate.
«My car this weekend has gone very fast»
After a run-in with Lewis Hamilton at Spa, Alonso had to ‘make friends’ with Sergio Pérez: The Mexican driver’s RB18 got in the way of the man from Oviedo at the moment of truth, a crash that led to a new complaint over the radio to his team as an outlet.
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“I had traffic from a Red Bull at turn 8… oh! I don’t know what I was doing», said Alonso, entangled in an attempt that ended up leaving him 13th on the grid, immediately behind Ocon.
Pérez ended up having to settle for 5th place on Sunday after suffering a spectacular accident in the penultimate curve touching the gravel and ending up stranded on the final banked line.
“My car this weekend has been very fast,” Alonso lamented. «I think that now we came half a second faster until turn 9, that we found the Red Bull and… a pity not being able to be in Q3 and take advantage of those benefitsbut well: Zandvoort is a very small circuit, very narrow»
«We knew that the time trial was going to be difficult and we had some traffic»Alonso continued, hinting that the starting position at Zandvoort is key. “The start will be crucial, the first lap too, trying to recover positions,” he said.
In the 2021 edition, when the Dutch track returned to the calendar after several years of absence, Alonso showed off a better use of the superelevations than his rivals, turning it into unique overtaking, a maneuver he will try to replicate this year.
“Then to see the strategy, if we can have some clean air; It’s a circuit where timing matters a lot, it’s very difficult to overtake. We started a little late, so it’s going to be hard work tomorrow,” Alonso concluded.