Fernando Alonso continued to weather a streak of tough moments in the Australian Grand Prix, a race that added another chapter to a season filled with misfortune for the Spaniard. After a difficult Saudi Arabian round where his Alpine crashed his chances with just a few laps remaining, he found himself in a similar bind in Melbourne. Even though his car showed high pace during Friday practice, a hydraulic fault blocked pole position on a day when the quickest laps were within reach, and a late shift in pace reduced his chances further in the last third of the session. The strategy race began promisingly, but a burst of trouble as the race progressed kept Alonso from capitalizing on early potential.
The two-time world champion chose a start on a set of hard tires and did not halt at the first safety car, pushing forward until lap 41 where he held fourth place. From there a drop in form pushed him back to 14th, and upon rejoining the track he found himself surrounded by a line of cars led by Gasly. In a troubling turn, he could not reclaim his pace and slid to 17th by the time the race ended.
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“Honestly, no words,” Alonso admitted on the DAZN F1 microphones. “It’s hard to accept how everything went wrong. We’re only in three races and the championship is long, so I hope luck returns on the next dates.”
“I think there will be more chances soon, but we’ve now conceded another sixth-place result in Bahrain and another sixth or seventh in Saudi Arabia, and we were off yesterday’s best time by a noticeable margin,” he added. It would have been easy to think Verstappen’s podium was out of reach, but the day still belonged to the winner. Alonso suggested that the car could have performed better on a different strategy and reflected on a missed opportunity for a stronger finish. The team brought a contrasting plan by starting hard and trying to cover the mid-phase with a different rhythm, which required patience as the middle stint dropped the pace — a window that never fully opened for a podium push.
“I think we could have been faster than Mercedes and George Russell finished on the podium, so we missed a big chance,” he remarked. The car felt competitive, and while the tough decision to start on hard tires delayed a potential ascent, it also opened the door to a different strategic route. As the race wore on, the idea was to shift to a hard and then a medium compound, but a regrouping of the safety crew disrupted that strategy and altered the plan entirely.
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After the pit stop, Alonso found it nearly impossible to recover. “It was difficult because when you’re one on one you can pass with DRS, but when there are four cars, all the doors close. DRS was not usable in that moment. We can’t look back and we have one more chance at Imola,” he stated.