Fernando Alonso arrived at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix with the aim of leaving behind the bad memories of the Australian GP, where he suffered both in qualifying and in the race to achieve those results that he has been pursuing so much since the start of the season.
Despite the fact that the Alpine A522 has shown to be a car with great potential in the first three races of the course, reliability and bad luck have prevented the Asturian driver from being able to fight for more ambitious positions, getting only two points to date .
In a classification marked by red flags and changing conditions due to the rain on the Imola track, Alonso managed to bring out his talent and the performance of the car and finished with the fifth best position in Q3.
Once the session was over, the Spaniard was happy with his result and with the sensations of the car: “It feels good to finish in the top five after qualifying that has generally been very strange, with changing conditions and many red flags” .
“Weather and track conditions changed all the time, anything can happen, so overall I’m happy to start in the top five tomorrow.”
“The car felt quick in the last two rounds of qualifying and I’m pretty comfortable with how the car is behaving here. We’ll see how we do tomorrow as there are now points up for grabs in the sprint race and the sprint race. Sunday”.
Alan Permane , Alpine’s sporting director, also assessed what happened in qualifying on Friday at the Emilia Romagna GP: “We were left with a bittersweet feeling after the qualifying session. Unfortunately, the team had different luck on both sides of the garage. Esteban’s car had a gearbox failure in Q1 and we will look into it.”
“As we saw with Fernando , the car had pretty good pace today, so it’s disappointing that Esteban couldn’t show his true potential, especially in conditions where we’ve seen him shine in the past. On Fernando’s side it was a relatively easy session, tomorrow he will start fifth, which is a very good place to start in the sprint race, and Esteban will have the opportunity to recover some positions, “he concluded.
