In the round-up: Sebastian Vettel says that Aston Martin will stick with their new car concept despite failing to score in the Spanish Grand Prix.
In brief
“Still a lot of work to do” with new Aston Martin package – Vettel
After introducing a new car concept in Barcelona there was no points reward for Aston Martin, Sebastian Vettel finishing in 11th and Lance Stroll in 15th place.
However, Vettel said that despite that the team believe the revamped car offers greater development potential than its predecessor.
“We know that there’s still a lot of work to do with this with this new package,” he said. “And we know that it’s not going to be a massive step forward straight away. But we believe it’s the better direction in the future.”
“I think for everybody [in the race] the car felt poor because it was so hot, so slippery with the tyres,” Vettel continued. “We were going so slow, if you look at the lap times. We were doing like Formula 2 qualifying pace in the race. But we managed well I think and managed the tyres better than most people.”
Alonso qualifying mix-up “easy to fix”
Fernando Alonso exited qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix in Q1, after hitting traffic during his final run. Alonso had believed he needed to get over the line quicker to not face the chequered flag, which turned out not to be the case.
Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer said that the team would revise the way they communicated track position to Alonso. “In the future, we’ll tell him how much time he has because we know on the pit wall at different areas of the track.
“So he knows exactly because he thought he had two seconds when he had 16. So it’s a big difference.”
Szafnaur said that it wasn’t a case that Alonso had misinterpreted Alpine’s relay of data, simply that he hadn’t asked for clarification. “I don’t think he got the message.
“But also communication is a two-way street. He could have asked as too, ‘how much time do we have?’…