Fernando Alonso hopes that his home race in Spain can be the spring board for a string of good results as he aims to score points for the first time since Bahrain.
The Spaniard ended the opening round of the season in ninth, and looked set to score again in Jeddah following an exhilarating battle with Alpine team-mate Esteban Ocon, but a reliability failure put him out of the running.
His luck did not improve from there. An oil seal issue denied him pole in Melbourne after he went quicker than Charles Leclerc in each of the first two sectors, before an ill-timed Safety Car saw the 40-year-old finish outside the points.
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Collisions with Mick Schumacher and Pierre Gasly cost Alonso in Imola and Miami respectively, so it has not been an easy run-in for his side of the Alpine garage since round one.
The double world champion has only scored points on one occasion at his home race since he left Ferrari at the end of 2014, so he would love to set that record straight in his home country.
“It feels great [to be back in Spain],” he said during the press conference.
“Obviously we have only one opportunity in the year to race at home so yeah [I’m] ready to maximise it and enjoy every single minute on the weekend and hopefully we put a clean weekend on our side – Friday, Saturday, Sunday with not too many issues and we can score points finally.”
With so much misfortune befalling him recently, the 32-time race winner would like to start transforming Alpine’s qualifying pace into good results on Sundays.
“At the moment we have been quite fast on Friday and Saturdays but then on Sunday we, for different reasons – our own mistakes, reliability, bad luck, whatever – we didn’t score as many points as we wanted so we want to change this,” he added.
Alonso stated that he would like to build “from Barcelona and have a good round on consecutive races in the points from now on.”
Ahead of this weekend. the Spaniard was joined by MotoGP riders Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Vinales at his circuit in Oviedo, a 90-minute flight from Barcelona, where he and Ocon took part in a fun filming day with them.
“Last Tuesday we had some fun in my home town of Oviedo, on my circuit,” he explained.
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“They came to visit us together with Castrol, our sponsor, and I was riding some minibikes and they were riding also with us and then Go-Karts, Clios, so it was a fun day.”
Alonso is 16th in the Drivers’ Championship after being displaced by Alex Albon’s ninth-placed finish last time out in Miami.