Fernando Alonso fears his point-less run will continue in tomorrow’s Spanish Grand Prix after a misunderstanding with his team on the radio led to his elimination in the first round of qualifying.
The Alpine driver’s race engineer Karel Loos originally told him there was plenty of time for him to complete his final lap and begin his last timed lap before the session ended. “We’ve got a huge amount of margin so let’s not go too slow,” Loos told Alonso as he joined the track for his final run at the end of Q1.
But halfway around the lap Loos warned him he was now “quite tight on time”. Alonso overtook Lewis Hamilton ahead of him at the end of the lap but began his final run immediately behind Lando Norris and had to abort it. That left him unable to claim a place in Q2, having been 12th at the end of his previous run.
“It was a misunderstanding in quali,” Alonso explained afterwards. “I started a lap behind Lando thinking that I had one or two seconds margin with the red light. But then I had like 20 seconds margin.
“If I knew that in advance, I would create more gap with Lando and do my own lap. But I heard in the radio ‘it’s very, very tight, you need to go now, now, now’. So I went immediately when they told me and it was not necessary at the end.
“So that was a misunderstanding obviously with a high price because at Barcelona if you start at the back, everything becomes more difficult.”
Alonso, who has not added to his points haul since the season-opener in Bahrain, says he will need some luck to finish in the top 10 on Sunday.
“There is not much you can do. This is Barcelona, not much overtaking, a lot of tyre degradation when you run behind cars. So let’s see.
“The last couple of races, people started at the back, they got very lucky and they scored points. I’m one of those tomorrow. So if I have one of those mega fantastic Safety Cars in the right moment, maybe I get lucky and I take a couple of points, but I doubt it. I…