Fernando Alonso‘s run of podiums came to an end at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, but after DRS problems earlier in the weekend he had reason to smile on Sunday afternoon.
“It worked today. A lot of speed, I’ve never been that fast down a straight for the whole weekend!”
The Aston Martin drivers had been unable to consistently use DRS on Friday, when qualifying for the grand prix was held. Alonso and team mate Lance Stroll lined up sixth and ninth respectively on Sunday’s grid – the worst qualifying performance so far this year for both drivers at the team which has been the surprise package of the season to date.
In qualifying for the sprint race they were only eighth and ninth fastest as they suffered from the same problem. But a fix was found and implemented with the permission of the FIA. Alonso and Stroll finished sixth and eighth in the sprint race, then fourth and seventh in the grand prix.
Stroll was asked about the lap time impact of having faulty DRS around Baku, a track featuring several long straights. “I don’t think we would have been on pole… It’s always hard to say. For sure we would have been a couple positions ahead on the grid.”
To have qualified two places higher he would have needed to have gone a third of a second faster, with an improvement of just under a quarter of a second required for Alonso to have qualified in the top four.
Team principal Mike Krack played down the impact of the fault, pointing out their DRS was only failing to open in one of the two zones. “It was more a distraction than a genuine disadvantage,” he explained.
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“The DRS was working on the back straight. So it was obviously a small penalty, but in both sprint and in the race, it worked.
“When you do the analysis, in qualifying we lost mainly in sector two, which is not the DRS zone. So obviously it is a distraction, and a lot of the team is then focusing around that. That is also the reason why you don’t want to have these issues in the FP1 session.
“But overall, I think we managed to solve it. We would have liked to solve it earlier on, or not have it in the first place, but at the end of the day it’s not such a drama.”
All teams’ cars were put under parc ferme conditions – which limits what changes can be made – a day earlier than usual last weekend under F1’s sprint event format. However Aston Martin was nonetheless able to put a solution in place.
“We did everything with…
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