Fernando Alonso is confident that his Aston Martin Formula 1 team’s choice of a low downforce spec for Baku will be provide an advantage in Sunday’s race.
Alonso, who qualified eighth and best of the rest behind the cars from the top four teams, says that a similar strategy worked well in 2023, when he qualified sixth and finished fourth.
He believes that it will help himself and team mate Lance Stroll in racing situations, although more sliding will be detrimental to the tyres.
“Definitely, we have less downforce than the others,” he said. “It’s a strategy that we think can help us into the race.
“We followed that direction also last year, to be fast on the last sector. It helped you to defend, and it helped you to attack. If there are any restarts, you have that also extra speed when you go on power.
“So, yeah, let’s see. Obviously, you have a penalty on the tyre deg, we will struggle more with the tyre deg, but it’s the way we think is the best thing for tomorrow.”
Alonso had an unusual qualifying session. Having struggled in Q1 and scraped through in P15 he was then fifth in Q2 having found more grip, before taking eighth in the final session.
“We went into qualifying with a very open mind in terms of how fast we can be, because it has been a little bit difficult to read the times until now,” he said. “But with no confidence in the car. We cannot hide the fact that we were struggling with the car the whole weekend.
“This circuit with extremely low grip we found this year, same for everybody, like three seconds every session slower than last year, plus the low downforce nature of the track, if you don’t have the confidence in the car, it becomes a very tough weekend. And we don’t have that confidence in the car that we lost a few weekends ago.
“So yeah, it was tricky. I was P15 in Q1, which was very worrying, and I was pessimistic into Q2 but then in Q2 we were P5. so yeah, we made a bigger step in terms of performance.”
Aston has reverted to an older floor spec this weekend, although Alonso was cagey on the results of the experiment.
“Until the Q2 lap, the older floor was not giving us anything very, very different than what we’ve been doing the last few weekends,” he said. “So, yeah, I think it’s difficult to tell, but we gave more data to the team to keep understanding the car.”
