Fernando Alonso, Lance Stroll looking for answers as to why Aston Martin ended up being so quick in F1 Hungarian GP to register handsome double points finish.
After the disaster in Belgian GP, not many would have picked up Aston Martin to be inside the Top 10 in all of the sessions in F1 Hungarian GP at Hungaroring. It was not just Alonso performing, but Stroll backed his teammate, despite the Spaniard missing FP1 due to back issues.
They were on pace from the get go as the best of the rest. The only competition was the pair of Visa Cash App RB and Sauber cars, as they even took the fight to Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari. They actually managed to clear both the Red Bull cars and one of Mercedes and Ferrari.
Alonso even managed to get Lando Norris off the line and gave a fight to George Russell at one point. He lost to both, but was happy to be the best behind in fifth. “Yeah, it can’t go any better than this,” said the Spaniard to media. “Obviously, someone told me that the two McLarens were very close to each other at one point, that would have been even better but it didn’t happen.
“Apart from that, we maximsed the performance of the car in qualifying and in the race, not much more to do on our side. The biggest threat was Verstappen on the two stops but he had some traffic and yeah, at the end we were a little bit more relaxed. Before my pit stop, I didn’t want to loose much time, so I wanted him to overtake me in the main straight, not in Turn 2, because then we both loose a lot of time, so I said I’ll defend this straight and then maybe in the next lap, I’ll let him go.”
Stroll was seventh behind Gabriel Bortoleto, but managed to keep Liam Lawson at bay and even Verstappen, whom he lost out early in the race. The one stop for both the Aston Martin cars did the trick. “Yeah, it was a good weekend from start to finish, so yeah, it was fun,” he said.
The Canadian noted that the team has some ideas why they were quick, but on the bigger picture, they are as surprised as whole of media, their rivals and fans. The downforce levels seeming did the trick. “No I don’t think…we have some ideas but we need to understand why this weekend was so much better,” continued Stroll, when asked about where the pace came from.
“Clearly, the car has strength more on these kind of tracks than Spa, with efficiency, lower wing level and all that stuff, it seem to be competitive when we put the downforce on, it feels like this. The car was in a nice window from the beginning of the weekend to the last lap of the race. So, you tell me, I don’t know. What would you have said six days ago? I think we are all at the same thought process.
“We don’t really know week to week depending on the nature of the track where we are going to be, either fighting in Q3 one-tenth off pole or last two and a half seconds off pole, I don’t know,” summed up Stroll, as Alonso stated that they will be in the factory this week to analyse why they were so quick and how it can help them in the future races in their fight for fifth.
They leapfrogged Sauber by one point to be sixth and sit 18 points behind Williams. “It is a surprise definitely, it is a nice surprise,” said Alonso. “The good thing is that we are competitive, we are fast, the concerning thing is we don’t know why, so we need to be at the factory this week to analyse exactly what are the differences between the car in Spa and Hungary, what are the differences in the car as well on the set-up, aero devices that we were racing with, obviously the main thing for us was the front wing was new this weekend. If that front wing give us that much of performance then it is very good news but that has to be understood.”
Here’s Aston Martin on Enrico Cardile
Here’s how F1 Hungarian GP panned out