Source: RacePictures.com

F1 News

Alonso: We didn't have the pace to score points

Alonso: "We didn't have the pace to score points"

12-11-2018 10:25
2
Author profile picture

Nicolás Quarles van Ufford

In his penultimate race as an F1 driver, Fernando Alonso couldn’t get any higher than P17, but the Spaniard admitted that McLaren simply didn’t have the raw pace to get near the points in Brazil.

The writing was on the wall when Alonso couldn’t qualify higher than P16. McLaren have stopped developing the MCL33 for some time now to focus on the 2019 car, meaning that performance has dropped significantly since then. Both papaya-orange cars rarely make it out of Q1 in qualifying now, and any point that is scored is seen as a massive victory.

Nor Alonso nor Stoffel Vandoorne got anywhere near that.

“You never know what’s going to happen, but today we were risking it with the strategy as we stopped very early to undercut the cars in front of us,” Alonso explained to Movistar + F1.

“I think that with the way the mediums behaved, we might have stopped too soon, but you can only see that after the fact, when the race has already finished.

“With the second stop, that undercut we tried to do ourselves, the others ended up doing on us because we came out behind everyone.”

The first pit stop went disastrously as well, with the right rear of the Spaniard not being bolted on properly. That stop cost around ten seconds instead of two or three, which is valuable time in the early stages of a Grand Prix.

“Nor the strategy nor the stop worked today, but still, I don’t think we had the pace either way to score points.

“We didn’t lose a big opportunity to score points or anything like that.”