Max Verstappen easily earned the pole position during the qualifying session before the Melbourne race. However, two Mercedes drivers George Russell and Lewis Hamilton ended up beating Fernando Alonso for second and third place respectively and surprised everyone in the process.
Even though he was moved back to fourth place, Alonso thought Aston Martin had their best qualifying performance of the season yet during the Melbourne race, simply because they were way closer to pole position than all the others so far.
He said to F1Flow.com/Autosport when asked about his Albert Park results: “I think this is our best qualifying out of three so far since we’re a lot closer to the pole position. I’m fast and it’s easy for me to drive, I like it.”
In Bahrain, Fernando Alonso was fifth place in the race, but he was over 6 tenths slower than Max Verstappen. In Saudi Arabia, he fell short of Verstappen’s team-mate Sergio Perez by 0.465 seconds and in Australia, he was much closer toVerstappen with only a 0.407 second difference.
However, when we compare Melbourne’s track with Jeddah’s track, Melbourne is way faster which means that Alonso cannot back up his claim of getting close on Melbourne’s street circuit when compared to other tracks.
Still though, Alonso thinks it will be hard for him to get past George Russell and Lewis Hamilton and wants to try for second place at least.
Tomorrow, it’s going to be interesting to see how we compete with Mercedes because they had super fast cars during practice. But overtaking them if they’re ahead is going to be hard for us.
In the race, I think we’ll be competing against Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari too since they perform better in these cool conditions. So let’s see what happens!
Here is something interesting to read!
– Albon did an amazing job driving the car and it helped him secure a surprise spot on the third row in Q3.
– Russell was surprised by Mercedes’ speed and he was disappointed he couldn’t be on pole position at the Australian GP.
– Masi said coming back to the F1 paddock again felt like being reunited with his long lost family!
