It is no secret that qualifying for the Monaco GP is vital for the race, given the difficulty of overtaking on such a narrow circuit with few straights. In addition, the current generation of cars, so large, presage a Sunday where there is little exchange of positions.
In Alpine they are aware, as in the rest of the teams, that reaching the qualifying session on Saturday at the ideal point begins to mean a good result on Sunday. On the first day, this one on Friday, neither of the two French cars finished in the top 10 in FP1, before Fernando Alonso did sneak into the top ten with an eighth position in FP2.
“Monaco is always different to other tracks as you need to find confidence in the car,” said the Spaniard, before summing up the first two free practice sessions. “FP1 was a bit difficult for us, but in FP2 we started to achieve objectives in my car.”
Alonso admits they are not where they want to be yet, and believes the car’s overall performance could be better heading into the decisive Saturday: “There is still more to come as we suffer from an inconsistent balance here and there that we need to correct, as well as trying to understand the tires a bit more for qualifying, as getting a good grid position is obviously the main issue of the weekend.”
“There is work to do, but it is always special to drive here, with a lot of adrenaline on every lap.”
Pat Fry , technical director of the team, spoke in the same vein: “The Monaco GP weekend always presents some unique challenges for the cars, drivers and engineers. Today’s day was certainly challenging, especially for the new single-seaters from 2022, with which it is a good challenge to configure the car in a small optimal window.
Fry pointed out the importance of understanding the different performance between his drivers, as while Alonso was 13th and 9th, Ocon was unable to get past 16th and 18th.
“Fernando [Alonso] was a little bit happier with his car than Esteban [Ocon], so we have some data to work on to understand the differences,” he said.
And he also insisted on the pending work: “We, like all the teams, have to learn more about the tires with a lot of fuel load. In general, not everything has been easy, but we are confident that we can dig into the data and find improvements tomorrow before qualifying, as we know grid position here is often key to having a successful weekend.”
For his part, Esteban Ocon revealed the different configuration of his car compared to Alonso’s, and expects a long night of work to reach 100% in the classification: “It is clear that there are some improvements that we must make to be where we want to be this weekend in terms of performance.
“We learned a lot today with different set-ups between the two cars and now there is a lot of work to do overnight to be in a better position for tomorrow. It will be important to do well as we know how crucial qualifying in Monaco is. I also have room for improvement, so I’m looking forward to practicing more”, concluded the #31.
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