Fernando Alonso of Aston Martin F1 Team had a remarkable performance during the Japanese Grand Prix, which he described as one of his top five weekends in Formula 1. Despite starting in fifth position, Alonso remained cautious due to concerns about Aston Martin’s race pace with the AMR24. He ultimately finished in sixth place after being overtaken by Charles Leclerc of Ferrari.
Alonso made a different tire choice from the rest of the top 10, starting on the Soft compound. This decision was influenced by the tire allocation for the Suzuka weekend. He explained, “We didn’t have any other tire available, so we chose our race since Thursday. We were thinking that was the best strategy, to have Soft-Medium-Hard into the race, and that’s what we executed.” Alonso didn’t feel a significant disadvantage during the first stint on the Soft tires, considering it to be an acceptable performance.
Towards the end of the race, Alonso faced pressure from Oscar Piastri of McLaren and George Russell of Mercedes. Russell, who had previously crashed while chasing Alonso in Australia, attributed his failure to pass Piastri until the final lap to Alonso providing him with DRS. When asked about his confidence in retaining sixth place, Alonso admitted, “Obviously not fully confident, because you never know what the pace of the others will do at the end of the race. But yeah, I think it was my best weekend, I don’t know, within the top 5 ever for me. I think P5 yesterday in qualifying and P6 today in the race is completely out of position, so yeah, very proud.”
Alonso emphasized that this weekend was exceptional because he was able to outperform both Mercedes and McLaren with a slower car. While Aston Martin came close to Mercedes in the Constructors’ Championship, Alonso’s teammate Lance Stroll struggled and finished in 12th place. Alonso acknowledged, “Well, I think we are the 5th fastest team by a good margin to the 4th and a good margin to the 6th, we are quite established there. I think there is no way to compare us with Ferrari, McLaren, Red Bull, and Mercedes, so that’s why finishing P5 and P6 is completely unusual. We did it in Australia as well, we finished P6, here P6 again, P5 I think in Jeddah, so we are executing the races very well. And the others are experimenting a little bit with the strategy and other things, and we are capitalizing on those, but we need to improve the pace for sure.”