Formula 1

F1 News: Fernando Alonso Responds To Albon’s Anger Over “Driving Slowly”

After a complaint from Alex Albon, Fernando Alonso has denied purposefully stopping in the track to slow down traffic during the qualifying of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

This occurred when Alonso struggled with the rear wheels of his Alpine locking up at Turn 15. As he took the run-off, he slowed down Albon who was in his Williams behind him.

“He needs to get penalised, this guy [Alonso], he has to,” Albon told his team over radio at the time. “This is ridiculous. He was doing it the whole lap. He was driving slowly on purpose and then it was so obvious, how he went off the track it was ridiculous.

“He braked so early and then he just went off the circuit.”

Now, Alonso has responded to this when asked about it:

“Not really,” he told Autosport.com “That corner I think we saw during qualifying that it was extremely challenging.

“I braked late, I could not make the corner I thought, so I took the escape road. McLaren did as well in Q2, Sebastian [Vettel] thought that he could make the corner and broke the front wing. So, there’s always a tricky decision that you need to make in a tenth of a second.”

“I know it resulted in frustration because there were queueing cars and only two and a half minutes [left] at the end of Q1. Honestly, I understand them because I have been in the opposite position as well many times.”

He added that maybe something should change so this wouldn’t happen again.

“I think Esteban [Ocon] missed Q3 because of a yellow flag in Q2 from McLaren, so we need to find a better solution for this kind of problem because we should all be able to make our laps.

“Even the old format with the superpole, where we all had one lap alone on track, maybe it was good for TV and it was good for us as well, because at the moment there is too much interaction with other cars, with tows, with yellows flags and this is not the best.”

Alex Harrington

Alex started racing at a young age so certainly knows his way around a car and a track. He can just about put a sentence together too, which helps. He has a great interest in the latest models, but would throw all of his money at a rusty old French classic and a 300ZX. Contact: [email protected]

Related Articles

Back to top button