Great gesture from Alonso with his team after Monaco with a clear underlying idea

Fernando Alonso finished 2nd in the Monaco F1 GP after a clear practice of Max Verstappen leads with a superior car. In the dry, the Dutchman’s car was better at race speed and breakdown, but it rained at the end of the Grand Prix to give Aston Martin a chance to win. At that exact moment, Fernando had to stop to change tires due to their wear and both the driver and the team debated on the radio whether to fit intermediate or dry tires. They dried the medium tires, not knowing that at that moment, it began to rain more heavily. If he had placed in the intermediate, with Max stopping a lap later and having to make a very slow turn towards the pits with a lot of difficulty, the Spaniard could have found himself in the lead or had good options to fight to win.

Chris Horner, head of Red Bull, talked about the pain of his rivals making sure that this movement gives them oxygen: “I was surprised that they put the medium tire. That completely freed the us from a difficult situation.”. AND Fernando, when asked about this in a press conference, did not hesitate to defend Aston Martin for the decision madewith a great gesture towards his team that makes clear a strong main idea: the total communion that exists between Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin.

If anything bothers Fernando Alonso, it’s when a team doesn’t give its 100% and doesn’t work with the same ambition. He prepares 120% and expects the same from his teammates. And he wants to win. That’s what Aston Martin found. A team with the same ambition. Pedro de la Rosa explained it very well to MD recently: “All teams always tell you that they want to win. All of them. But you realize that to win, the price you have to pay is very high. At all levels, it’s not just an investment. That’s why I think Alonso is very comfortable in Aston Martin since he arrived because the ambition is total, the ambition to win is not a promise, it’s a reality. In the end it can go well or bad, but the message .. . the feeling when you are in the factory with the whole team is like this”.

Alonso knows the team is giving everything with a clear and shared goal. Because of this, he will always defend Aston Martin before anything and everything. And he did it after the Monaco GP, a great gesture that needs to be seen if another driver has done it. Without going any further, the start of the course saw Max Verstappen criticize his team on several occasions, the same team that led him to win two titles. Not so Alonso, who after missing a good opportunity to attack, was smiling, content, happy even if he didn’t win. He knows that there are many more opportunities and the main thing is that he is in the right place and at the right time.

This is how Alonso defended his Monaco team:

“It was very clear to me that the track, on that lap that we stopped, was completely dry, except for turns seven and eight. So how do I put the in-betweens?”Alonso said in the following press conference, something that was very clear in the radio messages that Fernando had before the stop.

There, the Asturian made sure there were two curves for intermediates and the rest of the track was for dry tires. And Mike Krack, head of Aston Martin, assured that on his radar it did not indicate that it would rain very hard in the next moments and they did not know that by the time they stopped the track was wet because when Alonso was on his way to the pits, the track was still dry, while other rivals could have made a clearer decision as they were riding on wet asphalt at the time.

“It was completely dry, 99% of the track. So we stopped. The weather forecast was for a small ‘shower’ and a small amount of rain. That’s what we had as a team. And we have a lot of space behind us to put the dry tires and, if necessary, the intermediate tires,” added Fernando, unquestioningly defending his team. “So maybe it was the safest thing to do, I don’t know, but that minute and a half that it took me to go through five, six, seven and eight again, the track completely changed. The start lap on dry tires was wet when I got to those corners. But the lap we stopped was completely dry”argument.

“The team is brave, we go all or nothing”

And he denied that the team was not brave, because he said that it was brave at the beginning of the race when he wanted to start the event on a hard tire, with less grip than Verstappen (medium) and his pursuer Ocon (medium). ), to go to for a different approach than Red Bull in finding opportunity. The position is at risk with Ocon coming out with worse rubber in the first few meters and he wants to highlight this: “I think we were brave in approach. It’s not normal that you start on the front row of the grid and choose the hard tire trying to do the opposite of the leaders. It shows the commitment of the team and how aggressive everyone at Aston is Martin is trying to achieve success.”

“We know it’s busy, that with that approach maybe we could finish on the podium, fifth or sixth, but in the morning we discussed it and said we have a few podiums this year, so we have to go all or nothing. and we started with hard tires. And we don’t have enough rhythm. That’s the only problem we have in the race,” he continued.

“I think the strategy is good. In our opinion, the medium tire performs well. We expected more ‘graining’ (degradation in Verstappen’s medium rubber) or more wear and tear and Max drove 50 laps in an incredible way. And that’s why he won the race, not because of the strategy, he was just faster than us”, he concluded, making it clear: “There was no chance of winning. The winner is very fast today. On any tire, in any conditions, Max is always faster than us.”