Photo credit: Aston Martin Aramaco Cognizant F1 Team
After the disappointing qualifying of the Mexican GP, Fernando Alonso admitted that he is not doing a good job during this race weekend in Mexico City. A situation, undoubtedly, resulting from an AMR23 performing less and less compared to the beginning of the season and, above all, increasingly “complicated” to understand and develop.
After a surprising, and at times astonishing, start to the season after a difficult but growing 2022, the Aston Martin team is facing a very difficult final part of the season, with an AMR23 unable to grow on a par with its rivals and reach the same performance levels expressed until the summer break. A car which, even on the occasion of the Mexican GP weekend, is not shining at all and which has led Fernando Alonso to claim that he no longer has much confidence in his car after having spins on Friday and Saturday.
A performance, as mentioned, not very brilliant for the AMR23 which, at the end of qualifying in Mexico City, saw the Spaniard not go beyond 13th position and Lance Stroll only finishing in 18th place. A weekend which, up until now, has been defined by the two-time World Champion as “very complicated”, both due to the inconveniences experienced and the chronic lack of performance which led the Silverstone team to obtain poor performances in qualifying.
“Yesterday [Friday] at the high-speed corners, I lost the car, today on the kerbs, I lost the car.
“It seems that we are on the edge always on the grip. And we’ve been slow in every session. So it’s not a bad qualifying, or anything like that.
“We have been struggling the whole weekend. So yeah, tricky. We need to work all together to get back to our best level, which is obviously not the one we are showing.”
A weekend which, as well as for the team, is certainly proving to be not without pitfalls for the Spaniard himself who, by his own admission, declared that he had not been comfortable with the car from the first lap of FP1 in Mexico City.
“This weekend has been particularly difficult for me. I don’t know, maybe Lance was a little bit more confident this weekend, but I was not.
“I was not doing a good job, this weekend, I felt always on the back foot, and I was always not trusting the car.
“And as I said, a big spin yesterday at high speed could have been into the wall or anything like that. So I was not at my best either. So we need all to improve.”
An Aston Martin which, over the course of the season, improved but not as much as its rivals, and have badly fallen away. Proof of this is the one brought to Austin, considered beneficial for the car, but it was not capable of making Stroll and Alonso take a tangible leap forward.
“Obviously, we had the Austin race also, which we used as a compare between the two packages. And the results were clear in favour of the new package.
“So we don’t have any concerns about that. But it seems that we are not very confident now on the car. Driving, we cannot extract the maximum. And this is penalising a lot.”
As a last word, Alonso has not however lost faith and hopes of being able to have a good race in Mexico and of returning to score points after the difficult trip to Austin.
“We scored points in Austin [with Stroll] starting from the pit lane. So tomorrow, hopefully we can still score points starting on the grid.
“I think the temperatures and running behind cars is always a big penalty here in Mexico, because of the temperatures and things like that.
“So it’s going to be tough for everyone. It’s a race to see the chequered flag, and we’ll see what happens in the front as well.”
