Fernando Alonso has explained why he threw caution to the wind and attempted to run through the final corner of the Red Bull Ring flat-out during the second round of qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix.
His McLaren team mate Stoffel Vandoorne had already been eliminated at the end of Q1, and Alonso was now battling to avoid the same fate at the end of Q2.
It looked like his final run might have been enough to put the Spaniard into the top ten. But he came into the treacherous final corner at such a high speed that he wasn’t able to keep the MCL33 on the track.
“On my final lap, I was two tenths slower than on my previous lap,” Alonso explained afterwards.
“For the final two corners, I said to myself, ‘Let’s try and do this flat out, in case I can recover those tenths.’ But that was over the limit!”
Alonso’s flamboyant approach to the final corner certainly earned him some airtime on the official Formula 1 world feed, and succeeded in putting smiles on faces in the McLaren garage which has been having a difficult weekend.
“We had some fun today and the car was good to drive,” he insisted.
However there was no question that 13th place on the grid is not where the two-time world champion and 2018 Le Mans winner would ever want to be.
“This still isn’t the position we want, and we need to keep improving,” he agreed, adding that there hadn’t been much more he could do on Saturday.
“We did our best in qualifying today, and I think we maximised the package,” he said.
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Alonso’s final run in qualifying had been undertaken on the yellow-marked soft tyres, the slowest of the three Pirelli compounds available to drivers this weekend. He explained the decision to run that tyre to the media after the race.
“We had one set less of ultra-softs,” Alonso added. “We chose to have two yellows … We ran one in Q2 and it was not too bad. It felt good and it should be a good help for [the race].
“Tomorrow, we need to aim for points by thinking about the best strategy. We have a free choice of starting-tyre and all possibilities are open for us. I’m relatively optimistic.”
Meanwhile Vandoorne will be starting the Grand Prix from 15th place, after a one-spot promotion resulting from a grid penalty for Sauber’s Charles Leclerc.
“I didn’t have any particular issues this afternoon,” the Belgian shrugged. “Qualifying was more or less what we expected.
“We changed a lot on the car yesterday, but we left it alone today,” he said. “But it still felt a little different from one set of tyres to another, which was hard to explain.
“Maybe it’s the tyre preparation, or other cars doing warm-up laps before starting their push-laps.”
Vandoorne had lost time in practice on Friday when he damaged his front wing on the circuit’s aggressive kerbs. And the MCL33 suffered more damage on Saturday.
“Everyone who’s touched those yellow sausage-kerbs has broken bits of their car,” he complained. “Even in qualifying this afternoon, a bit broke off my car – and I didn’t even touch any of the kerbs!
“They’re quite harsh: I don’t see the reason for putting them there: if you’re going that far onto the run-off, you’re losing time anyway,” he sighed. “We’ll see tomorrow what the race brings.”
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