The frenetic double between Monaco and Barcelona gives way to analysis in Aston Martin. Although it is true that in the middle of the Spanish GP there was still talk, and a lot, of the strategy that the team followed in Monte Carlo and that led Alonso to make two stops in two consecutive laps to go from hard to medium, first, and from medium to intermediate (rain), later. With Verstappen only making one stop to fit the wet tyres, his lead skyrocketed from then on in the race to win by a huge margin over the Spaniard and Ocon. The question is, what would have happened if Aston Martin put the water wheels to the first?
Answer your own Mike Krack, team leader: “The computer says that if we had put intermediate we would have probably started ahead of Max. But that doesn’t mean we would have won the race. So yeah, knowing what happened next, we would have done that. But when making decisions you have to trust the data they have. We don’t bet. Everything was done as it should be done, although ‘after the fact’ there are things that you could have done differently”.
Alonso himself, upon arriving in Montmeló, left a reflection on the recurring questions from the foreign press: “We made the right decision… With a crystal ball, if you know who is going to stop and what conditions there will be or if it is going to rain, one hundred percent you stop and put intermediate. But I don’t like that in F1 you always see the negative. From the sofa it is very easy. If we stop and put intermissions, it would only talk about Red Bull’s bad decision for not having done it before. It is the limitless pursuit of perfection in F1.”
“We saw half the track dry and the other half somewhat wet. If we have a free stop, we put dry, what everyone else is wearing, and it rains (what happened), we all stop again and continue in the same position. But if we put in intermediates and it doesn’t rain, I would have to stop again and I would drop to seventh position. So if making a bad decision we are second in Monaco… we take it. Of course, if we see the race again we would stop for intermediates, but why didn’t Max do it? It was hard to know what was going to happen. We don’t talk enough about the constant successes of each team, only about the mistakes of some ”, Fernando commented.
In line with that message, Krack adds: “It is the nature of F1. We are exposed, we live with it. We want people to talk about us when we do everything right, we have to accept reports when something could have been done better. There’s no drama. I understand that Fernando highlights it because it is a fact. In this public sport we are always analyzed”.