Aston Martin made the right decision to bring an extensive upgrade for its car this weekend despite only having a single hour of practice to test it, says Fernando Alonso.
The team endured a difficult start to its weekend in Austin as both drivers pitted early in practice due to braking problems. Alonso was able to return to the track but team mate Lance Stroll could not and therefore covered just five laps before qualifying.Alonso said the team believe they would have been able to make more progress with their car at a regular race weekend with three practice sessions.
“We think so, or we want to think so because obviously with more free practice, you have time to test many different combinations of set-ups and many different ways of optimising the new package,” he said.
“It was a bit risky to bring maybe the upgrades to a sprint format. You rely so much on a perfect FP1 with two cars doing different tests between the two, and we had a very chaotic FP1. Since that moment, I think we are on the back foot.”
He said the team hopes to make more progress with its car at the next round in Mexico, which is not a sprint race weekend.
“We’ll go to Mexico soon, we have three practice [sessions], we’ll test many things in the car and we feel hopefully more competitive. It is painful this one.”
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Both AMR23s failed to progress beyond the first stage in qualifying for the grand prix on Friday. Alonso’s previously unbroken run of reaching Q3 at every round this year came to an end.
Alonso and Stroll will start today’s grand prix 17th and 19th respectively. They qualified higher up for yesterday’s sprint race but were unable to score points.
“The frustration was not really increasing in the race because we’ve been a little bit on the same page the whole weekend,” Alonso reflected.
“We’ve been uncompetitive in FP1, uncompetitive in qualifying and no different in the sprint race. The car is in parc ferme since FP1 and maybe we have not optimised in terms of setup.”
However Alonso believes bringing the upgrade to this weekend was worth the risk as he doubted he would have scored points with the car in its previous specification, despite having done so in the sprint race and grand prix in Qatar.
“If you look back to the weekend, for sure you [would] wait one more race. But, it’s not that the previous package was fast enough to guarantee places in the top 10.
“We were struggling already for a few months, so the whole factory is working flat-out to deliver this package to Austin and you cannot say in the last moment, ‘okay, we wait for Mexico’ because everyone is working day and night to bring new parts.
“So I think the biggest problem we had was FP1, too many problems in FP1 that we need to address and we need to make sure that that’s going to happen.”
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