Arrests and bravery are presupposed to bullfighters, to politicians with a real vocation and to pilots with options to win. Sometimes it turns out well and the bull (or the voters) is not cruel, and other times it is not. In this case, Aston Martin flipped the coin and this time it came up tails, but no one denies their courage. Although they may have lost their first great chance of victory (the last?), it cannot be said that they played like a lesser team (something that Ferrari did, for example), Fernando Alonso knows that he has people behind him who are willing to play it for him.
The Spaniard, 2nd in the finish line and therefore with his best result of the year, was left without 33, but he is aware that he can potentially reach it. Max Verstappen had to sweat to win, something that on the other hand he already knew he was going to go through, and benefit from an obvious blunder by Aston Martin. Just because he was brave doesn’t mean he was right. Esteban Ocon didn’t need such bravery, but a great qualifying, Leclerc’s timely suspension on Saturday and a bit of luck in this race to give Alpine a podium finish they never dreamed of.
An uneventful outing
The objective was to have a clean start and, evidently, Alonso knew that he had much more to lose there. For this reason, and aware that he had a different strategy for going with hard tires compared to the medium ones with which Max Verstappen took the race. The Dutchman, aware that his teammate on the front row of the grid was not going to take any chances, tried to push and open a gap in the first part before thinking about possible tire changes.
From behind, in addition to a touch from Stroll with an Albon that was too slow in Loews or a Hulkenberg (who was penalized) that was too hot, there were no major problems to be regretted in the early stages of the race, although that did not leave this first without touches. third of the Monegasque appointment. One of them was Carlos Sainz, who was trying to pass an Esteban Ocon who held third place until the maximum. The pressure, a small oversight or simply that he gambled too much caused the Spaniard to touch a rear tire of the Frenchman’s Alpine with his front wing, which caused him to lose a winglet from his nose. Surprisingly (or not so much if you take into account the characteristics of Monaco), the SF23 of the man from Madrid was going practically the same and they decided not to go into the pits to change the broken part but to maintain the strategy as planned. At Ferrari, the less you go into the pits, the less chance of a blunder.
The performance of the tires was the protagonist throughout the race, in which, as almost always on this circuit, there was little action. Fernando Alonso made the Sunday paella choke in the throats of many Spaniards who made an impasse on their election day. When the threshold of the first quarter of the race was crossed, Alonso reported on the radio that something was wrong with his Aston Martin. He was complaining that the left front part was going too far, which made him fear a possible puncture or something similar. Although he was scared, it was at this moment that Verstappen took more advantage of him until more than 10 seconds. He had to go on the attack.
Ferrari’s constitutional blunder in the pits
Taking advantage of the bends that hampered Verstappen was critical for Alonso. Just at the moment when the Red Bull means were beginning to fail, the pit lanes began to come into play. Ferrari failed, how could it be otherwise, with Sainz: Ocon entered the pits, they covered him… and it did not go well. Not only did he come out from behind the Frenchman from Alpine, but covering himself from Hamilton didn’t change anything either. The anger that the man from Madrid carried was tremendous in the face of a custom that is almost immutable in each management of the Scuderia.
Alonso maintained the difference with Verstappen between 7 and 10 seconds of margin, something that was insufficient for the Spaniard. Coupled with the coverage of the doubled that played in this case in favor of Verstappen, all eyes were on the pits… and on the sky. And it is that, unlike Seville, the rain in Monaco is a nightmare. As we passed the 50 lap border, several drivers began to report that some drops were beginning to fall on the circuit. What at first did not seem serious was seriously worrying right away.
The rain revolutionizes the ending
The first to mount wet, intermediate tires were the drivers behind. Stroll and Bottas did not take long to put the green tires (who fears nothing, nothing is at stake) but those in front knew that they had to make more arrests: that is why Fernando Alonso mounted medium tires and not wet ones. At Aston Martin they immediately realized that they had missed that match point and immediately ordered Alonso to go back into the pits to put on intermediate tires. The move did not go as planned and, although the victory went down the drain there, second place was practically guaranteed. In addition, seeing that he could still rain more (and it did), the clear failure of the Aston Martin tactician was minimized to a certain extent.
The downpour ended and although the track remained wet until the end, it left several victims. Stroll was the only one to drop out after crashing after Loews, Sainz had a spin in the Mirabeau… In short, a chaos from which those at the top narrowly escaped unscathed.
As the heart rate dropped, and except for a few scares (Verstappen touched the wall), the race remained unchanged. Alonso achieved the 103rd podium in his sports career, something that ironically tastes like little. Who knows if that Aston Martin mistake wasn’t his last chance.
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