Fernando Alonso: “This was a race to forget, I had an ‘uncontrollable’ car”

The race weekend in Singapore turned out to be a major disappointment for Aston Martin. According to Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin does not really know what causes the poor performance, but the coming race weekend in Japan will certainly have to improve.

Things went wrong on Saturday for Lance Stroll, who crashed during qualifying and therefore ultimately did not participate in the race. Things didn’t go much better for Alonso. Alonso started the race from P7, but after a messy second half of the race, mainly characterized by a pit stop that went wrong on lap 44, Alonso eventually had to settle for fifteenth place at the finish. So no points for Aston Martin and Alonso.

“I think we all expected a strong race weekend in Singapore, that wasn’t the case,” said Alonso. “We didn’t have the speed we hoped for. Too many things went wrong: a mistake driving into the pit lane, a bad pit stop, traffic during the race. It was a race to quickly forget.”

Alonso hopes that the coming race weekend in Japan will go a lot better. In particular, problems with the controllability and general behavior of the car must be solved. At one point, Alonso even announced over the on-board radio that the car was ‘uncontrollable’.

“We have to look at it because it was really difficult to drive the car, the rear of the car was not behaving well,” said Alonso. “After the pit stop we quickly destroyed the tires, it was a tough race. We have to look at the details, of course we don’t have the answers yet, but things will have to be better in Japan.”