Aston Martin F1 faces a tough challenge in Saudi Arabia as Alonso and Stroll fight to improve pace and confidence for qualifying.
Fernando Alonso has had a tough start to the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend. The Aston Martin F1 driver, who mentioned last week that consistently aiming for the top 10 was out of reach, seems even further from that goal as of Friday.
“We completed clean laps, but our pace is still behind where we’d like it to be,” Alonso commented. “We ran a few tests today, and we’ll compare data from both cars to try and close the gap to the top 10.”
Alonso, who has typically performed well in Jeddah, admitted that the car was not in its optimal window for performance. “I’ve always been comfortable here, but the car is not where it needs to be. We’re struggling with front-end grip, which makes it difficult to have the confidence to push through the corners. We’ll need to work on that tomorrow.”
The Spanish driver joked about having to overtake 26 cars on a single lap, saying, “It was tough! I had bad luck on the first lap, but the second one was clean. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. We’ll need some luck in Q1, but qualifying usually goes better than practice, so we’re hoping for a clean session.”
Lance Stroll also had a challenging day, struggling to find his rhythm and even going off track during a session, though fortunately without any significant damage. “It wasn’t our most competitive day,” Stroll said. “We’ll see what we can work on overnight to improve for tomorrow.”
Reflecting on his off-track moment, Stroll explained, “The rear just locked up, and I lost the car. It’s tricky, but we’ll work on improving it.”
With the current performance of his AMR25, the Canadian is uncertain whether he will make it out of Q1. “It’s going to be a tough challenge, for sure. We didn’t look strong today, but we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”
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