Alonso 'speechless' after more bad luck in Melbourne

Fernando Alonso reckons that he just can't catch a break after suffering another bout of poor luck in the Australian Grand Prix.

The Alpine charger missed out on a potential spot among the top-four in qualifying after suffering a hydraulics issue in Q3, which positioned him P10 on Sunday's grid.

Forecasting a long first stint, Alonso opted to start his race on the hard tyre. But the Spaniard's alternate strategy blew up when a crash by Sebastian Vettel a few laps before the race reached its half-way mark triggered a Safety Car.

Running at that point among the top five, Alonso stayed out which only deferred the problem. When he was brought in with 20 laps to go, the Alpine driver just drifted down the order and into to the lower tier of the field.

"Speechless, to be honest," said a despondent Alonso after the race, describing his feelings on another botched opportunity to achieve a good result.

"It's hard to accept that everything is going in the wrong way at the moment. But it's only three races in the championship, still 20 to go.

"Luck I guess is going to compensate sooner or later in the 23 races and we will be in other occasions lucky, I guess so.

• 2022 Australian Grand Prix - Race results

"But at the moment we lost P6 in Saudi guaranteed. Here I think we were looking for P6 or P7 before the safety car.

"And obviously, if we take into account yesterday, the podium today was very easy with Max [Verstappen] out.

"Beating George [Russell] to the podium, I think we were quite fast, a lot faster than the Mercedes in this circuit, so we lost an opportunity."

Alonso said that the start of his second stint on the medium tyre wasn't ideal as he was stuck along with three other cars in a DRS train headed by Aston Martin's Lance Stroll.

"It was difficult," he said. "We exited the pitstop and there were four cars in front of us with a DRS train.

"If they are one-by-one you pass them, but when they are four and they all open the DRS, it was impossible. So we killed the tyres.

"As I said, it's tough but it is the way it is. We cannot look back, only look in front of us, and Imola is another opportunity."

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