Home fans inspire Alonso to 'deliver extra' in comeback bid after Spanish GP qualifying

“And I like this motivation to deliver something extra. The circuit and this Grand Prix has been always very generous to me in terms of results. I’ve been always performing well here. So yeah, hopefully we can have a good weekend.”

Remarkably some of Alonso’s new fans were not even born when he first raced here with Minardi in 2001, and are too young to remember the years when he was fighting for titles with Renault and McLaren, and even with Ferrari.

“Obviously we are in a different world now, compared in the past,” he noted. “This digital environment, the social media of this time that we are living now, brings a new generation into the race, younger generations.

“So they have a different way of enjoying the sport and watching the sport. So yeah, I embrace that, I try to give them what I can, I will try to not be too serious about things on the internet or memes or something like that, try to embrace everything because it’s what they expect from us as well.

“So it’s good to see all this enthusiasm about the sport now in Spain, and hopefully they enjoy the weekend if it’s the first time they come. And if it’s just a repeatable experience, hopefully they have a different weekend as well.”

Alonso took responsibility for his qualifying performance this weekend, where he was more than a second off Max Verstappen’s pole time. He said that the damaged floor, sustained after an error in Q1, cost him around 0.2sec and that he’d lost more when running wide in Q3.

“Q1 probably did compromise everything today, I did a mistake,” he said. “I went on the damp part of the circuit I guess on the last corner, because I lost the car. And then it was very costly because that gravel completely destroys the floor.”

“I’m optimistic for tomorrow, because the car seems to have a lot of pace.”

Even with the damage, Alonso believed he could have qualified alongside Verstappen with a final Q3 lap that was on target to be in the 1min 12.7sec range — good enough for P2 or P3 — until another mistake. “I ran wide into the damp part in Turn 10 on the outside,” he said.  “When I saw now that [1min] 12.7 is P2 and P3 I was surprised, because that’s why I’m optimistic for tomorrow, because the car seems to have a lot of pace.”

Speaking before Pierre Gasly received a penalty, moving Alonso up the starting grid from ninth to eighth, Alonso added: “I would say top five, top six has to be possible from P9. I realised that Checo [Perez] is starting at the back, so it’s like a starting P10, not P9 because he will pass by very fast”

The double world champion has been an impressive team player this year, and that was reflected in the way he backed the much-criticised tyre strategy call in Monaco when it would have been easy for him to have suggested in public that he could, or should, have won the race.

“The computer system says that if we had gone to inters, we would have probably come in front of Max,” Aston team boss Mike Krack noted on Friday.

“But that does not mean we would have won the race. So yes, with the full benefit of hindsight, that would have been the case.

“When you make the decisions, you have to rely on the data that you have. So, from that point of view, everything was working as you should have it work. And it’s clear that with the benefit of hindsight you might sometimes do things differently.”

Well aware that the team has done a good job for him in all respects this season, Alonso himself is adamant that the crew made the best decision it could with the information available.

Yes, it was starting to rain, but had he gone to inters and the rain had then eased off he might not have held onto that second place.

A chance to jump Verstappen – who went one treacherous lap longer on slicks before going to inters – slipped away, but second was a decent outcome. Better to bag the points.

“I think it was the right decision,” Alonso noted this week. “Maybe if you have the crystal ball and you know the conditions, you know who stops, who doesn’t stop and then finally it rains and you need the inters, yeah 100% you stop for inters.

“What I don’t like in F1 is that we see always the negatives and we always see everything very easy from the sofa. And I tell you an example, if we stopped for inters, this week we will only talk about the wrong decision of Red Bull. They stopped one lap too late with Max.

“We will never say that Aston Martin was very brave and chose the right tyre. We will only talk that Red Bull chose the wrong tyre. And stopped Max one lap later.

“This is just the mentality of F1, the unlimited search for perfection which is not possible to reach sometimes.

Talk about a lost victory chance shows just how much progress Aston has made this year. However Alonso is keeping his feet on the ground, as always.

He’s under no illusions about the pace of the Red Bull and he knows that that the world champions remain out of reach in terms of a straight fight.

“I think we are in the same position,” he said. “We just had Checo [Perez] out of the equation in Monaco. So that’s why we fought for second. So yeah, I think the beginning of the season, we had similar opportunities. It was just Monaco a little bit closer.

“Let’s see when we have another opportunity, but I don’t feel in a different position, or we are getting closer and closer to Red Bull.”

Like most teams Aston has some new parts in Barcelona. Alonso is pleased with the way the AMR23 is progressing, but he’s also cautioned that Aston has to keep up with the big players as the development race intensifies.

“I’m happy with how we are approaching every race, there is always something new in our car,” he noted. “We try to keep up the pace with the top teams. I think we’re still growing on that area of the team.

“We found ourselves in a very competitive place this year that we didn’t expect. So I think we still need to speed up things.

“I think Ferrari is already two floors into this season, Mercedes, obviously a completely new car in Monaco and more upgrades here. Red Bull, Baku package and another one here.

“There is not a new part that we put in the car that is not helping the performance”

“So we understand that we are not in that position yet. But we stay humble, we stay delivering the job on Sundays, and try to score more points than them.”

The fact that upgrades keep bringing performance is a boost for the whole team. There was always a concern that those early races represented some sort of false dawn, with the AMR23 perhaps flattered by others underperforming. However Aston is always in the mix with Ferrari and Mercedes, and sometimes ahead of both.

“We knew when we had the first laps with this car that it was a step forward,” said Krack. “Because you have your data, you have the drivers that give you this feedback, but then obviously you have no competition.

“It is only in race one where we realised that the car was competitive. And that was obviously nice – but then immediately you think ahead, because Bahrain is very special. So is it also competitive in other places?

“Now it is about keeping it competitive: developing it, upgrading it at the speed that the competitors do.

“We have strong competitors around us that are used to this game, so yeah, we’re trying our best to bring continuously parts to the car. We have it for the last one, we have done it here, we will do it also in the coming races to try and keep the car there.”

Krack believes that opportunities for someone other than Red Bull to win races in 2023 will open up.

“We have to see race-by-race and it is also a development game that is going on,” he said. “We might also have a situation where when the championships are won, or whatever, that there is more concentration on the future and then other teams can catch up.

“So let’s take it race-by-race and keep our fingers crossed that someone else will win one or two or three.”

Meanwhile Alonso is enjoying being the focus of attention in Barcelona, and in typical fashion he’s been paying attention to all the details and processing the data on hat sales.

“Yeah, 67% I’ve heard on the merchandising and on the grandstand is green, which is amazing,” he smiled. “I think this is going back to the 2005-6-7 years where everything was in one colour, so I really feel that support, that special energy.

“It was amazing the fan forum this morning. While driving I cannot hear them, but I feel how enthusiastic they are, so hopefully we’ll get a good show for them.”