P1racenews AI automatic summary:
Fernando Alonso rescued seventh in the Chinese Grand Prix following a late pit-stop which dropped him outside the points.
Fernando Alonso described the Chinese Grand Prix as a “crazy race” but was pleased to rescue some points, after nearly crashing in the latter stages. Alonso did superbly to recover seventh after pitting in the closing laps, which demoted him outside the top 10. The Spaniard was in second during the opening stages after overtaking Sergio Perez at the first corner, but quickly shuffled backwards as a result of using too much of his tyres. He featured deep in the points for the first half of the race but was weirdly fitted with a fresh set of soft compound tyres mid-race, when a safety car was released for Valtteri Bottas’ stricken car to be recovered. Whilst this gave Alonso good pace for the restart, it was impossible for him to complete the remainder of the race on that set of tyres. It resulted in the late pit-stop which dumped him outside the top 10, only for a series of late overtakes to get him back into P7. His superior tyre advantage in the closing laps did allow him to claim the fastest lap point, in what appeared to be the best result he could salvage despite starting in third. Alonso commented post-race: “A crazy race, a lot of things happened for us in the race. Great start P2 for the first couple of laps and then a couple safety cars which probably didn’t help our strategy and made the others save their tyres a little bit and last until the end. We had to make another stop, that was not ideal. But yeah, at the end I nearly crashed but then fastest lap and P7 so all in all a great weekend.” The reason behind why Alonso was fitted with a fresh set of soft tires mid-race is because that was the “only” option Aston Martin had. Alonso explained this after the race and also took a swipe at the 10-second time penalty and three penalty points he received in the sprint race on Saturday, for being judged as having “caused a collision.” Alonso added, “Well, we we didn’t have any more Hard tires. So we had one soft and one medium left and 35 laps in front of us which in our calculation was not possible to make it until the end. Obviously, there were a lot of safety car laps removing the Sauber out. And then as soon as the safety car came in, more safety car laps because of the crash so that was I think, the lack that the hard cars had to finish the race. Yeah, the best thing is not to do the sprint race, probably on Saturdays, to keep more sets of tires for Sunday.”
