The United States Grand Prix of Formula 1 was not easy for Aston Martin, which was caught off guard with brake problems during the only free practice. Therefore, they couldn’t fully exploit the updates introduced in the car and also chose to start Fernando Alonso from the pit lane, making adjustments to his AMR23 in parc fermé.
In the race, the two-time world champion showed good speed and was recovering to join the fight for points when he had to retire with extensive damage to the floor. Alonso explained, quoted on RacingNews365.com, where the improvements came from:
– Optimizing the setup. I think in sprint weekends you run the risk of having only one session to optimize everything in the car. We didn’t do it and we had a very difficult session in FP1 with brake problems. We chose to change the setup, optimize everything a little in the package, and start from the pit lane. And that was a good result for us, good information that we extracted from Austin’.
The Spaniard also said: ‘The pace we saw on Sunday was a combination of us being optimized on our part and maybe our main rivals were not optimized having only FP1. It was the same for everyone and we took the opportunity to have a better Sunday’.
