FERNANDO ALONSO ALPINE DRIVER

Was your one-stop strategy attempt too risky?

It was risky, but in a way, we were P11 on lap twentysomething, when we started to stop everybody. We’d had to respond to Pierre Gasly, who stopped on lap [18], but then we were P11. I think the best way to score that 10th position was to risk, and we took a lot of risk. It didn’t work today because we finished the tyres at the end. But if we don’t do that and we stay out, probably Gasly will overtake us, Sebastian Vettel will overtake us, and then you are P12 or

P13 for the remainder of the race. So yeah, it was difficult.

Racing in the pack for so long, did you get a clear indication of Alpine’s race pace?

No, but I think we had some good answers on some of the performance of the car and performance of the competitors. I was more or less comfortable.

I think we had more pace in qualifying than the race, to be honest. We are putting things together, slowly step by step. The most important thing now is to get more performance out of the car on my side, and I think we identified what are the areas we can exploit from my side. We are working on that.

This week is going to be intense, again [with] some homework.

How did you feel battling in the pack?

It was fun. I really enjoyed it. First, because it was Barcelona, the home grand prix, so it was a special Sunday for me. The grandstands, there were not many people, only 1000, but you feel a little bit of adrenalin when you see the fans, and with the speaker saying your name [going] into the race.

This race was more special than the other three, for sure. Then the race was fun, lots of battles with different tyre strategies. We would have loved to have a better finishing position and score points, but it was not possible.