Fernando Alonso believed he would score points right up to the finish in Monaco – but the red flag put paid to Aston Martin’s plans on Sunday
The Monaco Grand Prix on Sunday didn’t exactly impress with excitement or chaos, but Fernando Alonso still got mixed up. Curious: At the end of the procession through the principality, the Spaniard actually thought he had scored the last point for tenth place. The disappointment was all the greater when he learned of his eleventh place
“I was confused,” laughs Alonso at the finish and tries to make sense of the misunderstanding: “Lance was ahead of me after the stops. The team said: ‘Okay, we’re safe in tenth place. We did all that for the last point,” says Alonso, who, as a team player, made the gap for Stroll’s stop possible in the first place.
“But then Lance had the puncture and I thought: ‘Oh, now I have all the responsibility on my shoulders to bring the point home with very old tires’,” says Alonso: “So I drove 50 laps, believing I was tenth. Then when I crossed the line and they told me P11, I said, ‘Oh, so all that stress was for nothing!”
“At least it kept me awake,” commented Alonso, looking back on the otherwise tense race, but he still can’t quite explain the miscommunication.
“When the red flag came out, Lance was tenth and I was twelfth. But then Sainz was put back into third place, so we were 12th and 14th, but should have been 13th and 14th,” says Alonso, looking at the order at the restart: “But Lance was ahead of Daniel, where he shouldn’t have been.”
Alonso waves it off with a grin: “I don’t know what position I started in, and I don’t know what position I was in. “
Alonso: “Kamikaze strategy” on medium tires
The race organizers didn’t make themselves very popular with the Spaniard by jockeying for position before the restart: “Some people were lucky today, we were unlucky. But we didn’t lose too many points as a result,” admits Alonso.
Aston Martin’s general pace at the weekend was too weak, “the car wasn’t really good for points,” says Alonso, who nevertheless asserts that his team could have scored some if the race had gone differently and other decisions had been made.
“I’m not saying we missed a golden opportunity, because when you start on hard tires you want to stop as late as possible. Then suddenly there’s a red flag and you have to put the mediums on to drive 78 laps to the end,” says Alonso, explaining what he describes as a “kamikaze strategy”: “The tires lasted in the end, but only at a very, very slow pace. “
“That’s also the magic of Monaco “
The bottom line is that the early stoppage on Sunday was the big tension killer, according to Alonso: “The only interesting thing about the race in Monaco is the pit stops. If you remove that element, there’s not much left,” said the Spaniard.
He adds: “This is simply Monaco. You have to accept that everything revolves around Saturday. But that’s also the magic of Monaco, with the qualifying lap. And we didn’t do a good enough job yesterday. “
With regard to the overall performance of his team, Alonso is a little worried after the performance in the Principality: “It was a bad weekend, we can’t hide our performance.”
Nevertheless, he wants to remain optimistic: “The last two weekends were important to understand our weaknesses, the car, in order to improve. Because you learn more from difficulties than from victories.”
The most experienced driver in the Formula 1 field therefore believes: “We will learn a lot from this for the rest of the year, including for 2025 and 2026. These two races were a big wake-up call and that will be very good for us as a team. “