Fernando Alonso slammed Aston Martin’s Singapore Grand Prix as a “race to forget”, after the outfit once again failed to show their early season pace.
It’s been a difficult second half of the campaign so far for the Silverstone-based team, who were expecting the Marina Bay Circuit to work to their strengths.
This wasn’t the case, with only Alonso having started the race after Lance Stroll had a huge crash in Q1.
Stroll missed the Grand Prix after still feeling the effects of his horror crash, which he thankfully walked away from.
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Whilst Alonso started in the top-10, he never had the pace to challenge the top five, with the AMR23’s tyre degradation having been woeful.
The two-time World Champion ended up finishing in 15th after a slow pit-stop, a trip off the circuit at Turn 14 and thanks to a five-second time penalty for cutting across the pit-lane entrance.
It was an evening to forget, to the extent that Alonso even slammed his car as being “undriveable” at one point.
“I think we all expected a strong weekend in Singapore, it was not the case,” Alonso reflected, as reported by Motorsport Week.
“We didn’t have the pace that we were hoping for. Too many things [went wrong]: a mistake going into the pit lane, a sloppy stop, traffic all in one race. So a race to forget.”
Team principal Mike Krack attempted to downplay Alonso’s concerns after the race and insisted that the car looked “pretty solid” on the Medium compound, with the Hards having been the problem in his eyes.
Krack recognises that several factors went against the British team in Singapore, but that it all started when they switched to the hardest compound.
“We thought we had a good rhythm,” Krack said.
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“I think we knew upfront that it would be difficult to go with the front guys. So I think on the Medium, everything ran pretty solid.
“Then after the Safety Car we fitted the hard tyres, and we struggled a bit more, we need to understand why.
“To a point where we said when the Virtual [Safety Car] came we were not sure that we could go the full distance with a decent level of performance.
“And we decided to change, and then the sequence of events, the penalty, the pitstop went wrong, and then we came out in a really bad position, and that was it at the end.”