Sixth place at the start of the Bahrain Grand Prix for Fernando Alonso. In yesterday’s qualifying in Sakhir, the Aston Martin driver was the best after the three “big teams”, finishing 0.363s behind Max Verstappen’s (Red Bull) pole position.
The Spaniard confided to the official F1 website that the result exceeded his expectations by a large margin: ‘I am incredibly happy with the performance of the car throughout the weekend. I think the winter tests were good, but we probably didn’t have the pace to match the front drivers and we were thinking that we weren’t as fast compared to Red Bull and Ferrari. And now in qualifying we are within a tenth of them – which is a huge surprise for us, but we accept it. The free practices were good, but usually in free practices we might use a little more engine power or something like that, and in qualifying we see the reality. But the performance was a very pleasant surprise’.
For this afternoon’s race, Alonso admitted that he now feels capable of having ambitions for the top five: ‘It opens up a completely new window for the race. If you asked me on Thursday or last week if we had a chance to be in the top five or even fight for the podium, I would say no. Now I don’t know if I can be so certain, so we will try’.
