A week on from a strong performance in Spa that allowed Alpine to stretch its lead over McLaren in the constructors championship, fortunes were reversed in today's qualifying session for the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort.
Although Fernando Alonso was in the top ten in the first round, he missed the cut at the end of Q2 after coming across Sergio Perez's Red Bull on his final flying lap and will start tomorrow's race from P13.
That's a far cry from last week where Alonso qualified in sixth and started form third after grid penalties for other drivers ahead of him, only to clash with Lewis Hamilton on the opening lap.
And it was little better for Alonso's team mate Esteban Ocon, who also failed to make it through ot the final top ten pole shoot-out round and will start one place ahead of Alonso in 12th.
"Unfortunately it’s not been our day today," Alonso admitted after the end of today's session. "It was the traffic in Q2 that cost us from going into Q3, as we were half a second faster and could have been in sixth position.
"We could not show the true potential of the car, but these things can happen on a track as narrow as Zandvoort."
"Let’s see if we can use the pace of the car tomorrow and have a better result in the race when it counts. It’s not easy to overtake here, as we saw last year, but we will push to score as many points as possible.”
For his part, Ocon said that it had been "a tricky day for us and [P12] is not where we wanted to qualify.
"We struggled a bit with rear grip and seemed to lack a bit of pace compared to previous weekends, so we’ll definitely have a close look at that," he explained.
"The weekend is far from finished," he continued. "We’ve been in worse positions in the past and points places are not far away.
"We hope for some more overtakes tomorrow and we’ll be giving it our all as always to have a solid race and get both cars back into the points.”
While admitting that today had been disappointing for the team, sporting director Alan Permane was also feeling optimistic when looking at their prospects for the race.
"We have work to do but I’m sure we can recover and score points tomorrow," he said. We line up 12th and 13th on the grid, but with the modified DRS zone this year, overtaking should be possible.
"We will be doing our hard work between now and the race to identify the best strategy.
"Fernando’s result is definitely not a reflection of his performance, he had traffic on his second Q2 run and would have been comfortably into Q3 without this," he pointed out.
"Esteban has not been quite at one with his car this weekend, struggling with the rear end in general around the lap," he added.
"We’ll do everything we can tomorrow to come away with both cars in the points and, the way we’ve been racing at recent events, I think achieving that is certainly possible.”
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