Fernando Alonso’s ‘pilot-engineer’ messed it up again

Fernando Alonso has shown on many occasions on this course, in addition to his speed and hands, another of his great virtues: his ability to analyze things and read races to know how to get the best out of the car at all times and take advantage of every situation that happens on the track. At the start of the Dutch GP, a tense moment even more tense because it rained, Fernando again made a difference thanks to his facet as an engineer, an analytical capacity like few others on the track that allowed him to get three position in two laps. The Spaniard knew what he had to do in turn 3 when he saw the raindrops on his visor and he was right. All thanks to something that happened to him in Free Practice 2 and the man from Oviedo remembers all weekend. If it rains, I want to try it. It did and it worked.

“In FP2 I was wet and on one of the laps out on the track I left two cars behind passing outside the normal racing line and found a lot of grip on the inside. It was a fluke. So on I thought about it all day. time (spinning inside turn 3) last weekend, that if it rained in the race, I would try again”, commented the native of Oviedo in a press conference.

“To be honest, when I was on the starting grid and the red lights came on for the start of the race, I had a lot fall off my helmet visor. That’s the worst feeling you can have, because you’re so close. You start a race with dry tires and you can see through your visor that it’s raining, so you don’t know how much grip you’re going to have going into Turn 1, under braking, and turn 3. I thought everyone was going to be a little bit careful .in turn 3 because at the (small) grip level and also outside turn 3 there was ARAMCO paint (from a sponsor), so I thought of going to the inside line. And it worked. And we managed to pass them and definitely I think it may be the overtaking of the month…”, he said with a laugh.

The team gave him the freedom to decide at the crucial moment

The team is so confident in their intuition and power of analysis and execution of plans, that at the crucial moment of the race, before restarting the event in the wet to give the last 7 laps, they let Fernando Alonso decide whether to attack the Verstappen to win, or secure second place. But he did not choose one or the other. He took risks in the beginning, but he didn’t do crazy things. He thought about victory and looked for it, but considered the importance of the points he could reap in the fight for the Constructors’ World Championship.

“I was thinking about trying it, not being conservative. At the red flag, I was thinking a lot about what to do, I thought about the possibilities I had, obviously moving into Turn 3 was something that was in my head, as well at Turn 1 and I talked about it. with the team to share my feelings, but I didn’t want to compromise some great points for the team, because second position is also very important”, argued the two-time F1 world champion.

“But (at Aston Martin) they were happy to let me try and they trusted me to decide what I decided,” he added. Aston Martin hid the captain’s armband for him at that crucial moment as well. “So at the start of turn 14 (with an 18 degree bank), I tried to launch my lap by entering the full throttle on the bank on cold tires, which is quite dangerous. pointed out. And another important detail. No Alonso wanted to risk an unfounded attack and when he saw that it was too far to try it in turn 1, in the next turn he chose something very safe, but also very practical.

Knowing that he could not make any mistakes and had to avoid any accidents or run the track, Alonso chose an interesting strategy: he decided to take lines opposite Verstappen. If it went wrong, it stayed the same. If it goes well, he can squeeze the Dutchman. “I tried next to Max at the end of Turn 1, but I wasn’t that close for it. Then I tried different lines, inside, outside, always opposite Max, because of the first lap, to see if in either of my lines I have a tighter grip than his”, he concluded on this matter “Close, but not enough”, he exclaimed.

This year, Alonso has gone viral on the networks due to several situations in which he showed his role as an engineer behind the wheel of his Aston Martin. A clear example of this is what happened in Australia, when Fernando, after receiving contact from Carlos Sainz at the last start, instead of complaining, asked the team to remind the FIA ​​that in a similar situation that took place in 2022 at Silverstone, where the race continued maintaining the previous positions. Soon, Race Direction did it, which allowed him to achieve a podium.

Later, in Miami, Alonso surprised everyone by telling his engineers that he had found a braking distribution that they could share with his teammate Stroll so that he could improve. In Miami, the Spaniard even said he was watching the giant screens while driving at 300 km/h to see if Stroll could get into the points, something crucial in the fight for second or third place in the Constructors’ World Championship . And in Austria, when he got out of his car, he had already calculated the points lost to Mercedes and Ferrari compared to Aston Martin in the Constructors.