Fernando Alonso had to overcome a painful back and brake issues to bring his Aston Martin AMR24 home in 14th place after a difficult Sao Paulo GP.
Alonso missed Thursday’s activities after returning to Spain for checks on a health issued he suffered in Mexico, and arrived at Interlagos on Friday.
He finished 19th in Saturday’s sprint, ahead of team mate Lance Stroll, after the race turned into a test session for Aston.
Sunday’s wet qualifying session was initially promising, and he was second in Q2 before having a heavy crash early in Q3.
The team managed to repair his car in time to make the grid, but he had to go back to an earlier and less favoured floor spec.
From ninth on the grid he held that position for the first half of the race, before slipping down the order in the latter stages his back became an issue.
“It was a lot of bounce and a lot of porpoising in the second half of the race,” he said when asked by formu1a.uno about the back problem.
“I don’t know why. So yeah, it was a tough race. We were out of the points. I think in any other circumstances, probably I will stop. But the mechanics did an incredible job before the race to put the car ready on the grid, so I had to finish for them.
“It was a difficult race. After this morning, we had to go back to a less performing package on the car. So the race was a little bit slower pace from our side. And then we had the brake issue.
“I think Lance had the brake problem in the formation lap, and I had the brake issue after all the restarts, where all the brake balance goes completely rearwards.
“It’s like a braking with a hand brake. So it was all-in-all a nightmare out there. We need to get better for the next three.”
Elaborating on his physical issues Alonso said: “It was painful, for sure, and yeah, the lead into this race, it was a lot of preparation from my side, a lot of checks, a lot of work, a lot of physio and doctors in order to come here in Brazil.
“So it was a lot of effort from everybody, same effort as the mechanics put today. It was not comfortable in the car. But there are people worse than me. Also in Valencia, we have these terrible images. And people struggling. So I had to struggle in a couple of laps for everybody.”
He agreed that his trip back to Europe between races hadn’t been easy.
“It was an incredible commitment to come here, to have the race, and the car really was not able to race with the others,” he said. “So that was the most painful thing.
“All the checks have been done. I checked everything the last two or three days, we did a lot of work. My condition, I think, after this race we have a setback for sure, on my body. So the next four or five days, we have to reset everything.”
Alonso also suggested that the FIA should look at some aspects of the weekend.
“It was a very non-typical race, with the qualifying and the race so close, even the time in between the two sessions,” he said. “Maybe it was too short, guys like Alex [Albon] didn’t have time to repair the car.
“So maybe we need to set a minimum time between the end of quali and the race just to allow everybody to race. Because the fans, they come here to see 20 drivers racing. At the end the weather allowed us to complete the race. So that was good.”
