Fernando Alonso was forced to abandon the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix after just five laps, after sustaining damage to the ground and the sidepod of his car after contact with Mick Schumacher on the first lap.
Alpine called Alonso to the pits when part of his car’s right-hand sidepod detached on the main straight, ending his hopes of scoring any points at the Imola weekend as he failed to take any in the sprint race .
That setback came after Alonso failed to score points in Australia, despite thinking he had the pace to fight for pole position, but a hydraulic problem sent him straight into the wall in Q3.
The two-time world champion has only added two points after four races, compared to 20 for his teammate Esteban Ocon.
“I’d rather finish the season better than start it well and finish it badly,” Alonso said after retiring from the race. “So if you want to choose one way to do it, it’s [to do it] the other way around and end up with better performance.”
“But at the same time, when you watch the races on TV – and I’ve seen too many so far in these first four – to have just two points in the championship when I should have maybe 25 or 30, it’s painful.
Alonso considered that he has had “many moments of bad luck” so far this season that were out of his hands, describing Imola as “another example”. But he also looked back to last season’s turnaround, which also featured a rocky start to the year.
“I remember last year after Imola I only had one point, and the season was a bit tough at that point,” he said.
“Then we finished top in the championship and [were] pretty competitive. So let’s see if we can do the same thing this year.”
Contact with Mick Schumacher damaged the updated flooring that Alpine had brought to Imola, leaving Alonso uncertain if it could be repaired for the next race in Miami.
“Everyone will agree that we have been very unlucky,” Alonso said. “We have some reliability issues, we had this issue in qualifying in Australia. This time everyone touched at the start and nothing happened, their cars seem unbreakable.”
“But our car, it was just a little kiss from Mick [Schumacher] and it’s completely destroyed. I don’t even know if this flat bottom will be usable in Miami.”
“There’s a lot of consequences out of our hands, not because of our own mistakes, just because of someone else or something, [and] that’s pretty painful.”
