For the second time this season, Aston Martin driver Fernando Alonso was beaten by his teammate Lance Stroll in qualifying. Despite this, the Spaniard feels comfortable with starting position seven in the Formula 1 race in Austria.
Up until Monte Carlo, Fernando Alonso had an impeccable record within the team, beating Lance Stroll in every relevant session. But after losing to the Canadian in Barcelona, he was also beaten by Spielberg in qualifying, so Alonso now has a 7-2 lead in the qualifying duel.
He was 18 thousandths of a second behind his team-mates on Saturday in Austria, which means only seventh starting position for Alonso – his second-worst qualifying session of the season. Nevertheless, he says: “I feel good after this qualifying session.”
“It’s always an intense qualifying session here, where the lap times are so close together. If you look at the timetable over the three sessions, there are two or three tenths between some cars,” said Alonso.
The Spaniard was also one of the drivers who had a time canceled due to the track limits. This forced Aston Martin to use an extra set of tires in Q2. “That meant we only had one chance for new tires in Q3, which wasn’t ideal.”
Aston Martin driver Alonso sees “good starting position”
“Nevertheless, sixth and seventh place is a good starting position for us. I think the weather will be interesting and exciting because there’s a chance of rain tomorrow and maybe dry conditions on Sunday. The car feels good so I’m for optimistic for the rest of the weekend.”
For Stroll, sixth place in qualifying (for the fourth time this season) was his best result of the season. “I was happy with how the AMR23 felt today and I was happy with my last lap too; I think we got everything we could out of qualifying,” he says.
Stroll was also a victim of the track limits twice – once in Q2 and once in Q3 – but takes a pragmatic view of the issue: “I had to cancel a few laps because I tried to tackle the fast corners properly, but that was the same for everyone and something we are used to from this track.”
Anyway, the deleted Q3 time was slower than his current one, so it doesn’t make a difference to his position.
“It looks like we might face slightly difficult weather conditions for the sprint races tomorrow, so it’s good to have a solid position for Sunday’s race.”