For the second race in succession, Fernando Alonso failed to make the top-ten shootout in F1 qualifying, the Spaniard bemoaning the lack of overall performance of his Aston Martin car in Mexico.
Alonso and teammate Lance Stroll have been constrained to the lower tier of F1’s midfield from the outset of their weekend.
On Friday evening, after concluding the day among the laggards in free practice, Alonso claimed that Aston had spent its sessions working on its high-fuel runs as a priority, insisting the team had no interest at the time in unlocking performance.
The Spaniard’s comments were echoed by team boss Mike Krack. But after qualifying had come and gone, with Alonso and Stroll concluding their day respectively P13 and P18, it appeared obvious that there had been no performance for Aston’s drivers to tap into.
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“It was a very tricky qualifying session today and we’ve not been performing at our best so far this weekend,” commented Alonso.
“We’ve tried a few different things with the set-up, but we seem to be losing pace everywhere over the lap.
“In the high speed corners with how low the car is on the kerbs, it seems that we are on the edge always with grip.
“It seems that we are on the edge always on the grip. And we've been slow in every session. So it's not a bad qualifying, or anything like that.
©AstonMartin
“We have been struggling the whole weekend. So yeah, tricky. We need to work all together to get back to our best level, which is obviously not the one we are showing.
"It's not just one sector that we are just missing all the lap time, it's just gradually slow. So we need to find more performance.
The 42-year-old F1 veteran admitted that, in addition to his car's performance issues, he hasn't been at the top of his game this weekend.
"This weekend has been particularly difficult for me,” he said. “I don't know, maybe Lance was a little bit more confident this weekend, but I was not.
“I was not doing a good job, this weekend, I felt always on the back foot, and I was always not trusting the car.
“And as I said, a big spin yesterday at high speed could have been into the wall or anything like that. So I was not at my best either. So we need all to improve.
"I still feel confident that we will show better performance from now until Abu Dhabi,” he added.
“We scored points in Austin starting from the pit-lane [as a team through Lance Stroll] so hopefully we can score points here."
Unsurprisingly, Stroll’s assessment of his own session confirmed his teammate’s analysis and tepid outlook.
“It’s been a tough weekend extracting performance from the car,” said the Canadian.
“We were struggling with pace throughout qualifying and didn’t have the grip to push. I got caught in traffic through the final sector on my fastest lap too, so I lost a few tenths there.
“We’ve got a big job to do from P18 on the grid, but we’ll get our heads down tonight and see what’s possible tomorrow.”
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