Alonso “very impressive from the moment he got in the car”

Aston Martin technical director Dan Fallows says he and the rest of his team are “very, very pleased” with the impact Fernando Alonso has had since joining them this season.

Alonso went quickest in two of the three practice sessions for the Bahrain Grand Prix before qualifying fifth for today’s race.

Fallows, who joined Aston Martin as technical director last season from Red Bull, expressed before qualifying how pleased the technical team at Silverstone had been by Alonso’s impact since joining at the start of the year.

“He’s clearly very impressive chap,” Fallows said. “He’s incredibly motivated, incredibly competitive and he’s brought a huge amount of energy to the team.

“I think he has been very impressive from the moment he got in the car last year. His feedback is where you’d expect it to be for somebody with his level of experience. But he has the ability to diagnose issues with the car in a way that, as an engineering team, we’re very, very pleased with.”

Alonso and Aston Martin drew the attention of rival teams and drivers with an impressive pre-season testing period in which Alonso regularly featured in the top five in the timings. Fallows said Aston Martin had focused solely on their own programme in testing, rather than trying to grab headlines with their performance.

“In terms of Fernando’s performance during testing, obviously he was very pleased with the car, he felt very comfortable in the car from the outset and he was able to put some competitive lap times together at the time,” Fallows explained.

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“But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, ‘at the time’ means on particular tyres using particular engine mode with particular fuel levels that may be completely unrepresentative what everybody else was doing. So we had to approach testing as being something that we did for ourselves, we wanted to gather our own data and we tried not to look too much at what other people were doing, to be honest.”

Fallows says Aston Martin have hit their own targets set for improving their performance over 2022, having already made the greatest leap over their Bahrain Grand Prix pace compared to last season of any team on the grid.

“We are pleased with the car,” Fallows said. “We targeted making a big step on last year’s car. So in terms of the performance relative to that, we’re definitely happy that we have made a step forwards.

“We set some fairly…