The first race of the year 2022 was not at all easy for Fernando Alonso, who started from the eighth position on the grid, but who soon saw how he found Valtteri Bottas at the start and that caused him to lose a position.
The Spaniard lapped in ninth place in the opening laps of the Bahrain Grand Prix until he decided to pit to change his soft game for a medium one in the hope of undercutting Pierre Gasly.
However, the two-time champion did not achieve what he wanted and little by little he was falling as the laps passed, even his teammate, Esteban Ocon, surpassed him by sheer pace at the end of the finish straight before 40 laps had passed.
Everything changed for Alpine when Pierre Gasly caused a safety car to catch fire in his AlphaTauri late in the race, causing the drivers to regroup. Alonso took advantage of this circumstance, added to the abandonment of Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez on the last lap, to enter the top ten and score two points thanks to his ninth place.
When he got out of the car, the Spaniard gave his impressions of the opening test of the course, saying that it was something positive for the French team: “Getting into the points is always the objective in any race, and we have achieved it in this first one, not without difficulties, because we had a lot of degradation and in the end we had rhythm in some part of the test”.
Alonso acknowledged that the first part of the race conditioned the rest and the final result: “The fight we had in the first stint with the tires was really a guillotine for us because we started to stop on lap 11”.
“But as I say, getting into the points was the goal and next weekend we have another chance,” said the two-time champion, who also spoke about what he had to suffer with the Pirelli compounds .
“The three sets of tires gave us quite a lot to do today, and after the fifth or sixth lap they degraded a lot,” said Alonso. “Some teams tried two stops, they still struggled a bit at the end, but the safety car was good for them to put on other compounds, so we are left wondering if we could have improved a bit more in the last few laps.
“It was difficult, but I am happy with the final result,” he said.
