With more bad luck in Imola, it's easy to see why he was frustrated when he reflected on his season thus far, having not scored since Bahrain.
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Alpine may have one of the most competitive midfield cars this season, but they haven’t been able to score as many points as they had hoped, with both drivers blaming bad luck in Imola for their lack of progress. While Esteban Ocon spent the majority of his weekend attempting to recover from a gearbox issue that derailed his qualifying, Fernando Alonso’s Grand Prix was a case of wrong place, wrong time.
Alonso qualified fifth and finished ninth in the Sprint, putting him alongside Mick Schumacher’s Haas in the Grand Prix. However, in the wet conditions, the German spun after only a few corners, catching Alonso’s sidepod with his rear wheel – the bodywork eventually ripping off on the main straight, revealing the A522’s guts.
“I saw on the replay that Mick spun unfortunately and touched my car and destroyed completely the righthand side of my bodywork and floor, and there was too much damage to keep racing,” Alonso said. “Another time it’s out of our control that we lost another race. We are extremely unlucky in this first part of the championship but there’s still a long way to go. Hopefully we can recover.”
Despite being fast on paper, the Spaniard’s race in Australia was hampered by a hydraulics issue in qualifying, when he thought he had the pace for the front row. With more bad luck in Imola, it’s easy to see why he was frustrated when he reflected on his season thus far, having not scored since Bahrain.
“The car seems quite fast this year and yeah, it is unbelievable that we have only two points in the drivers’ championship because I think it’s a little bit unfair at the moment,” he added.
In terms of his teammate, it was Ocon’s turn to have reliability issues in qualifying, and he was forced to retire in Q1. Although he improved his position in the Sprint to start higher in the race, his afternoon was marred by a five-second time penalty for an unsafe release in the pits, where he came dangerously close to colliding with Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes.
