Fernando Alonso has traced his “painful” United States Sprint to a trouble-strewn opening practice on Friday morning.
Aston Martin has introduced an upgrade package at the Circuit of The Americas this weekend.
It was an aggressive play given the Sprint format in use leaves just an hour of practice time to assess and understand the new parts.
As it was, brake problems for both Alonso and Lance Stroll inhibited their running, leaving the squad short of data and the car far from refined in terms of set-up.
With cars entering parc ferme the moment they roll out of the garage in qualifying on Friday afternoon, the team’s fate is now largely sealed.
Neither Aston Martin progressed beyond Qualifying 1 on Friday, and while it had a better showing in the Sprint Shootout, Stroll was forced out with brake issues while Alonso could do no better than 13th.
“The frustration was not really increasing in the race because we’ve been a little bit in the same page the whole weekend,” Alonso said after the Sprint.
“We’ve been uncompetitive in FP1, uncompetitive in qualifying, no different in the Sprint race.”
Alonso concedes it was a risky decision to introduce upgrades this weekend but reasons the Aston Martin package has hardly been blistering in recent races anyway.
“If you look back to the weekend, for sure you wait one more race,” he admitted when asked by Speedcafe if the team jumped the gun with its latest package.
“But it’s not that the previous package was fast enough to guarantee a place in the Top 10 – we were struggling already for a few months.”
The insinuation is it was a known risk, with the benefits presumably outweighing the drawbacks.
To extract those gains, however, required a near-perfect start to proceedings to maximise the track time available and therefore the opportunity to gather data.
“With more free practice you have time to test many different combinations of setups and many different ways of optimising the new package,” Alonso explained.
“It was a bit risky to bring maybe the upgrades to a Sprint format, you rely so much on a perfect FP1 with two cars doing different tests between the two.
“We had a very chaotic FP1 and since that moment I think we’re on the back foot.
“I wish we go to Mexico soon. We have three free practices with as many things in the car and we feel hopefully more competitive.
“It is painful, this one.”
