Fernando Alonso will start from fourth in tomorrow’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, two places back from the sensational second place he had in qualifying last year. The Spaniard has a good weekend so far, and after a P1 in the second practice on Thursday, he managed to wring the most out of his Aston Martin to secure the spot on the second row.
“Yeah, it was fantastic. I think for us, the one lap performance seems very strong on this car, it was strong in Bahrain, it was strong in all the three practises here and now in qualifying, we confirmed that we are in the mix with with McLaren, with Mercedes, which is a little bit of a surprise.”
The most experienced driver on the grid had a blast according to himself, enjoying every second of a qualifying session that was briefly halted with a red flag after Nico Hülkenberg’s Haas decided to forfeit the use of Ferrari-power.
“We are very competitive in one lap and our car is responding very well in qualifying,” Alonso reflects. “I enjoyed every lap out there tonight. On my final push lap in Q3 I managed to take a tow from Lewis [Hamilton] onto the main straight but maybe I lost a tenth of a second into Turn 1, so in the end it balanced out over the lap.”
Practice showed that the race pace of the Aston Martin is probably not up to par with the cars around Alonso, something the two-time world champion also noticed.
“In Bahrain, we were starting one lap and you know, we finished on our natural position, maybe on the race fifth fastest team behind the top four. So tomorrow we want to avoid that. We start P4 and hopefully we are not falling behind the Mercedes and the McLarens.”
So despite a good qualifying result, there is little chance Alonso will look forwards in the race. He explains they have made some changes to the setup that should benefit the long run performance, but a complete turn around compared to a week ago would be unrealistic he says.
“We look at the mirrors. Unfortunately, at the moment, we have to have the feet in the ground. Five days ago we were clearly the fifth fastest team, so I don’t think that could have changed so rapidly.
“So I think we qualify extremely well in the last two events and now we did some setup changes to improve the race performance. We will only have the answer tomorrow night after finishing the race, but yeah, let’s see. I think it’s a defensive race tomorrow.”
