F1
MPH: Fernando Alonso still has the magic – he’s not done with F1 yet
At 44 and showing no signs of slowing down, Fernando Alonso remains one of F1’s most extraordinary forces, writes Mark Hughes
Mark Hughes: Russell's F1 recovery drive could run into an Alonso-sized problem
F1
A power-unit penalty leaves Russell with a mountain to climb in Singapore, and Alonso could prove an unexpected obstacle, Mark Hughes predicts
What happens when a recovering Russell meets resurgent Alonso in Singapore?
DPPI
George Russell goes into the Singapore weekend with a horrible confluence of circumstances. Forced by his PU failure in Sepang to take an engine from outside the pool, he will therefore be starting at or near the back in Singapore, a circuit where overtaking is immensely difficult.
Not only that, but because the Mercedes ADUO-updated PU is not available yet, the fresh motor he’s taking here is of the current – soon to be outmoded – spec. So if he wants to get the benefit of the ADUO motor from whenever it’s available (probably from the very next race, at Austin), he’s in for another grid penalty too.
That’s just George’s lot. Nothing much he can do about it, other than enjoy the performance of a competitive car around a track at which he has historically shone and see where that takes him. There’s an almost zero chance of him emulating the trick of team-mate Kimi Antonelli at Monza in winning from the back, but a fresh-engined Mercedes should have the performance to get through the lower part of the field relatively quickly.
A lap time advantage of 1.5sec is reckoned to be what you need here to overtake, which should get you past the Cadillacs, Williams and Haas cars without too much drama. It gets more difficult after that and further progress will probably have to be done on strategy and tyre age offsets.
Alonso had his best race of the season at Sepang
Aston Martin
Normally, the Aston Martin would be included in those cars which would be easy passes, but on the evidence of Sepang that may no longer be the case. You may recall that its first upgrade of the year was in Hungary and it found the car something in excess of 1.5sec per lap, allowing Alonso through to Q2 for the first time. But since then until Sepang last weekend, that progress wasn’t so obvious and it was generally forgotten about. But it shouldn’t have been.
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All that has happened since then is: Honda introducing its ADUO-1 power unit at the next race (Zandvoort), bringing driveability problems which had been sorted on the old PU but now needed to be re-developed. Followed by Monza, the most power-sensitive track on the calendar where the PU penalty was always going to be huge. Followed by Madring where the driveability issues were still dominating, then Baku, almost as power-sensitive as Monza.
Only then at Sepang did we get the combination of a conventional track and an improved PU driveability. This was the first time since Hungary that we’d get an accurate read on the chassis progress – and it was more than good. Despite two decent-length straights, both Astons were comfortably through to Q2 and in the slow corners it was the second-fastest car.
Yes, Alonso was just over 2sec off Max Verstappen’s pole, but that was after giving away 2.2sec to him on the full-throttle sections of the track. Now we come to one of the least power-sensitive tracks on the calendar, with lots of slow corners. Might we be looking at an Aston in Q3?
In which case, might we see a recovering Russell and a resolute Alonso overlapping in the race’s latter stages? Could happen.
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