In the Chinese Grand Prix, Alonso faced a challenge with his tyre strategy. He started the race with medium tyres and switched to hard tyres after 11 laps. However, when a safety car was brought out to remove Bottas’ car from the track, Alonso didn’t have enough hard tyres left like his competitors.
Since he couldn’t finish the race with the hard tyres, his team put soft tyres on his car for the restart. But this meant he had to make three pit stops during the race instead of the usual two. When he made his second pit stop later in the race, Alonso dropped from fifth to twelfth place.
Alonso said, “We didn’t have any more hard tyres. We had one soft and one medium, and 35 laps ahead of us, which, in our calculations, it was not possible to make it to the end.”
Despite the setback, Alonso managed to fight his way back up to seventh place and even earned the bonus point for the fastest lap.
Aston Martin’s team principal, Mike Krack, explained that they were worried about tyre wear during the race. They thought it was better to take the risk of making an extra pit stop rather than trying to make a two-stop strategy work with the tyres they had.
Alonso acknowledged that Aston Martin was not one of the fastest teams in China. He knew it would be tough to maintain his position after starting in second place behind Verstappen.
Alonso said, “We keep repeating the same things but we see every Sunday that we are the fifth-fastest team.”
He hoped that they could improve the car’s performance in the future races.
