After a weekend in which there were more doubts than certainties in the French team, Fernando Alonso saved the furniture in the classification by putting his car in Q3 and getting ninth position, especially after the unexpected elimination of Esteban Ocon (which carried the renovated floor) in the first round of the qualifying session (Q1).
However, a five-place penalty for changing the internal combustion engine (ICE) on his power unit dropped him to fourteenth place on the starting grid for the 2022 Formula 1 United States Grand Prix.
Starting from a position further back than desired, the Asturian Alpine driver had the clear objective of finishing the race in the top ten, within the points zone, but the events that were awaiting him were not going to make it easy for him.
After a great comeback that took him to eighth place before reaching the halfway point at the Circuit of the Americas, Alonso suffered a serious accident when he hit the rear of Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin and his car flew through the air before landing and impacting violently against the protections of the Austin track.
Video: see again the accident of Alonso and Stroll in Austin
Despite this, the driver from Oviedo was able to continue in the race after going through the pits and changing the nose of his A522, but he rejoined the track in the last position of the peloton, with damage to his car and with the scare still in his body, something that lasted until the last lap, as he himself admitted.
Once again, with all the factors against him, Alonso staged a great comeback that placed him in sixth position, before losing it to Lando Norris in the last laps of the grand prix. Finally, the Spaniard crossed the checkered flag in seventh place but, a few hours later, the FIA penalized him with 30 seconds for driving an “unsafe” car and he fell to 15th place in a United States Grand Prix that he could not be more chaotic for Spanish.
Before receiving that sanction and as soon as he got off his car, Alonso left one of the images of the weekend. The cameras of the #14 car recorded the Alpine driver at the moment when he got out of the car, totally melted and practically out of air , having to sit on one of his tires to breathe and recharge his batteries a bit before continuing on his way and proceed to the FIA weigh-in area.
