In the round-up: Fernando Alonso says he is still not fully comfortable despite taking eighth on the grid.
In brief
Alonso “not in a happy place yet”
Fernando Alonso says he is still not fully comfortable with his Aston Martin in Austin despite qualifying eighth on the grid for today’s US Grand Prix.
“I think it’s a good result, for sure,” Alonso said. “It has been a tough weekend so far in terms of feeling the car.
“We made set-up changes after FP1 and after the sprint race this morning. We’re still experimenting a little bit, so I’m not in a happy place yet. But the result is good. Hopefully it allow us to score some points tomorrow. That’s the target.”
Being out of sequence hurt Williams – Albon
Alexander Albon suspects that being out of sequence with many of their rivals at the end of Q1 contributed to both him and Williams team mate Franco Colapinto being knocked out of qualifying at the first hurdle.“The biggest issue we faced was that I came out of the pit lane maybe a lap earlier than everyone else, so when we started our push lap, about nine cars had just come out,” Albon explained to the official F1 channel.
“I was overtaking a car almost every corner, and there was a lot of dirty air, which makes a big difference here.”
Alpine fined for unsafe release
Alpine have been handed a €5,000 (£4,166) fine after the US Grand Prix stewards found that Pierre Gasly was released in front of Max Verstappen towards the end of Q3 in a dangerous manner.
Verstappen had to take “significant evasive action” to avoid a collision, according to the stewards, necessitating the fine. Gasly will keep his seventh place on the grid for today’s race.
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Links
Audi to be granted increased budget cap on entering F1 (BBC)
'Formula 1 is to adjust its budget cap from 2026 to offset the costs of teams that operate in countries with higher salary levels, BBC Sport has learned. The move will help Audi’s attempts to become competitive when it enters F1 officially in just over a year’s time. Although it means Audi will operate to a higher headline budget-cap figure than rivals, the FIA believes the change will ensure that all teams are operating on a level playing field financially within the cap, given their specific circumstances.'
Toxic F1 season as Red Bull ‘cheat’ row with McLaren keeps tit-for-tat war raging (Telegraph)
'We may or may not find out whether Red Bull were doing anything questionable with their bib device. But it all feels like window dressing really. What really matters is the fact that Norris still trails Verstappen by 52 points heading into the Austin weekend. Close that gap significantly and the tension really will rise – possibly even placing a strain on their friendship.'
Brundle wants F1 ban that would hinder Hamilton and Verstappen (Mirror)
''I think we should ban blue flags. I think drivers have lost the skills of working the traffic, managing the traffic as we used to have to do I quite liked that! Now everybody has to jump out of the way like school kids when the big boys come through in the fast cars. But the trouble is, with today's aerodynamics, you might never get past the back-markers. So, things have changed a little bit like that, but I do think it's a skill that's been lost.''
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Social media
Notable posts from X (formerly Twitter), TikTok and more:
"Probably my best lap ever in Qualifying." 🤩
🤳 @LandoNorris #UnitedStatesGP 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/NsGQdDRYlr
— McLaren (@McLarenF1) October 20, 2024
A really difficult day for the Team. The work starts now to get us back on track tomorrow 👊 pic.twitter.com/lggnk2EUjj
— Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team (@MercedesAMGF1) October 20, 2024
No progress in the sprint. Brakes on fire at the end 🔥 time to focus for the qualifying and the race 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/wnIMn8saZL
— Valtteri Bottas (@ValtteriBottas) October 19, 2024
If you think you're having a bad day, at least you're not @WSJ's picture editor.
Yes, that's an Alpine, not a McLaren, in the biggest photograph on the front page.#F1 #USGP #RaceFans pic.twitter.com/imIfAewn0B
— Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine) October 19, 2024
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- Find more official F1 accounts to follow in the F1 Twitter Directory
Comment of the day
Yesterday’s sprint race was one that Tommy C found to be more entertaining than others this season…
As sprints go it was pretty reasonable. As usual, it kinda stalled out in the last five laps when you’d expect pitstops to be made. Interesting to see Ferrari’s advantage in that phase of the race. A shame for Lando Norris but this race was typical of his season: generally quick but quite scruffy. He can’t afford these little mistakes against Max Verstappen but they keep creeping in. I just hope McLaren maintains their momentum so Lando can come back stronger and more consistent next year.
Tommy C
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday to Danthorn, Shaggymike, F1Yankee and The Abbinator!
On this day in motorsport
- 40 years ago today Alain Prost took pole position for his championship showdown with team mate Niki Lauda at Estoril
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Nick T.
20th October 2024, 4:21
I like the labor cost adjustment to the cap. It’s not fair to penalize a team for working in a country where living and salary costs are higher.
Agreed with Brundle on blue flags. However, I’d like a happy medium where a car only gets blue flags after at least one full lap and then has one more full lap before they’re required to allow the car behind through. It’s especially silly when you see cars losing a full five seconds due to having to allow a leading car through.
The AM looks like a bag of crap. I bet they can’t wait to get all those new hires onboard let alone Newey.
Nick T.
20th October 2024, 4:27
PS – RE: the Alpine livery and the WSJ…that’s embarrassing for the paper. But I’m frankly astonished that Alpine chose to run this livery despite the fact that mockups would have made it abundantly clear that the car would look like a McLaren clone. It’s just embarrassing.
OTH, as much as people love to mock Renault/Alpine, it clear that they’re doing fairly well on the chassis side. If they had a decent PU, they’d surely be a consistent threat to reach Q3 and have far more points.
bernasaurus (@bernasaurus)
20th October 2024, 8:10
I’ve been scratching my head for the last few days on why they would do it? The only thing I can think is that it highlights the BWT because you’re looking for that to check to see if you’re looking at a McLaren or not. From a competitive point of view, surely it’s not a great look for investors, sponsors, fans of the team when they say ‘hey, we made ours look like probably the best car recently, the car ours certainly isn’t’.
The McLaren / Alfa Romeo in the 80’s had a reasons behind it, Alpine just seem to have done this because they could.
notagrumpyfan
20th October 2024, 8:36
It’s still embarrassing for the paper, but not fair of Keith to single out the WSJ photo editor.
The image was uploaded by AFP/Fallon with the incorrect meta data, it originally identified the car to be Norris’.
notagrumpyfan
20th October 2024, 8:40
And how embarrassing for me to link the wrong image; it should be this one. ;)
Jere (@jerejj)
20th October 2024, 7:16
I couldn’t disagree more with Brundle. The blue flag came into circuit racing back in the day for a reason, so removing it would make things unnecessarily messy in the long term.
I don’t blame WSJ for mixing up the teams because of Alpine’s temporary livery, as even I briefly mistook Ocon for Piastri when the Alonso-Lawson battle was shown as a replay from Alonso’s T-cam view with Ocon appearing from right at T13, & this only happened because Piastri was running the whole sprint relatively close to the Alpines, so probably not again in the race unless Alpines get lapped.
lynn-m
20th October 2024, 14:18
@jerejj Blue flags always used to be a warning that faster cars were coming up behind you and not something telling you to jump out of the way.
Most categories still use the blue flags in the traditional way where its just a warning rather than a ‘get out the way’ thing so F1 is in the minority in that regard.
I agree with Martin here. Getting through traffic used to be a core skill. Senna was a master of it while Prost was a bit more cautious so that always created an extra element of interest to races where they were fighting for position.
But then i guess in modern days where its all about the show rather than the sport you can’t have drivers challenged too much and you have to have gimmicks & other nonsense to make things easier for them so of course you can’t have drivers having to learn to get through traffic or actually have to work to get by cars in general.
BLS (@brightlampshade)
20th October 2024, 11:10
Removing blue flags isn’t really an option when the big teams have B teams / partner teams etc. It would cause controversy after controversy.
It’s bad enough when a B team goes for fastest lap.
Nick T.
20th October 2024, 19:51
That’s not the reason they went for fast lap Deas spite the insane levels of focus on a single point. However, you are correct and that this does present an issue especially with Red Bull having two teams. On the other hand, If they use the format similar to the one, I suggested it would be less of an issue. It still wouldn’t be perfect though. But one really wonders if Red Bull is even going to continue being a force at all. If not, it makes it much less of an issue.
Either way, I think there needs to be a happy, medium between drivers required to lose five seconds to pull out of the way within 3 corners and no blue flags at all. Maybe the rule could just be that the blue flag is automatically triggered once a driver gets within 7-tenths Rather than how it works now with basically a driver getting a blue flag if a leader is within 3 seconds or so.