Fernando Alonso reckons that despite Aston Martin’s improvement from Bahrain to Jeddah, the British outfit is still a few tenths behind McLaren and Mercedes.
The Spaniard said that the team brought an upgrade on Friday that “worked really well.” However, there is still a gap to close to the two aforementioned outfits.
“I think it was better. We did introduce a new part on Friday that worked really well. And I think we made a step forward in terms of performance.
“But we still miss maybe two or three-tenths compared to McLaren and Mercedes, and we will keep chasing that kind of performance. It is challenging, but it’s a nice challenge and an interesting season ahead.
“Happy with the race result, in front of both Mercedes, one McLaren, and one Ferrari. It’s the maximum I think we can wish for at the moment.
The two-time world champion said that Aston Martin needs to improve in the race pace, while qualifying was better both in Bahrain and Jeddah.
“We saw again in the race that we still miss two or three-tenths compared to Mercedes and McLaren, maybe a little bit more compared to Red Bull and Ferrari. While in qualifying, we seem pretty close. So yeah, we need to keep working on the race pace.”
Alonso concluded by saying that keeping George Russell behind for the whole race wasn’t an easy task, and he didn’t expect to be able to do so.
“It was stressful because I was pushing and Oscar was just pulling away. And George was significantly faster behind, so I was thinking, okay, it’s 43 laps to the end after the safety car.
“In FP2 we normally do nine or ten laps on the long run. So to do 42 was, let’s say, unknown territory in terms of tire age. So yeah, I was just making sure that the strategy was still a one-stop, and we didn’t change the plan.”